Amira Ben Saoud "Floating"

MODERATION: STEFANIE JAKSCH

Amira Ben Saoud's atmospherically dense debut is "a novel written with a hauntingly calm soul about the existential trials of humanity." - Clemens J. Setz

Violence seems to have ceased to exist, and climate change has long been a reality. A threatening calm hangs over the isolated settlement where she lives. She has no memory of her own name. She earns her living by imitating other women whose loved ones cannot cope with the loss of a beloved, a wife, a daughter. During a new assignment, her world begins to wobble: Who is this Emma that she is playing? Do strange phenomena at the edge of the settlement indicate its downfall? And why is she so obsessed with being someone else? Amira Ben Saoud delivers a captivating debut that lightly raises fundamental questions about identity and relationships, and about what we play for ourselves.
Amira Ben Saoud, born in 1989 in Waidhofen/Thaya, studied Classical Philology, Art History, and Comparative Literature in Vienna. She was the editor-in-chief of the pop culture magazine The Gap and a cultural editor at the Standard. "Schweben" is her first novel.