Anna Maschik: If you want to do it secretly, you have to kill the sheep.

What connects us to those who came before us? With a secretly slaughtered sheep, the gaze turns to the innards of a family. Here, the great-grandmother stirs the blood for the sausages, the great-uncle sleeps for fifteen years, and the grandmother steals the bricks from the roof at night. In the end, the great-granddaughter Alma stands and pieces together the fragments of her family history – from the meager everyday life on a farm by the North Sea, through the fresh start after the war, to the present, where Alma is the youngest and only remaining link in the chain. The great lines of life are carefully revealed: the constant becoming and passing away, and the influences that are carried on between generations. It is a story of favored siblings, of failing at sleep and language, of transformation into a piece of furniture, a wolf, a lemon tree. Laconic yet filled with floating magic, it tells of what destiny is and whether one can escape it. Anna Maschik, born in 1995 in Vienna, studied Language Arts/Literary Writing and Comparative Literature in Vienna and Leipzig. She worked as a production manager for a theater festival and teaches German and Spanish at a Vienna high school. She has published short prose and poetry in various anthologies and literary magazines. If You Want to Do It Secretly, You Have to Kill the Sheep is her first novel.