Lesung mit der Autorin Kathrin Bach aus "Lebensversicherung"

Reading from the novel *Lebensversicherung*, nominated for the 2025 German Book Prize.

The West German countryside in the 1990s: prefab houses on one side of the village, traditional farms on the other. The first-person narrator is born into a family of merchants. Her parents carry on what their grandfathers brought to the burgeoning villages after the war: selling insurance. The business brings modest prosperity—but also a fear that hangs over everything. For the next disaster is always just a phone call away. In Kathrin Bach’s prose debut, memories, images, and lists come together to form a tragicomic family history. It tells of that very German longing for security—and the realization that one cannot buy one’s way out of risk. And of a protagonist who confronts her fears in order to reaffirm her vitality through writing.