Dear Orenda community, dear readers!
Sharks is out today, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it – STOP, that’s a lie. You can’t really say that writing novels is only fun; it’s also a pain in the neck, at least from page twenty onwards. And, yet, it’s the best job I can imagine, and I am infinitely grateful that I can do it. But to make sure I don’t lose my train of thought and stay on track, I give my working day a strict structure, which I’d like to tell you about here.
I get up at 6:00am, make coffee for my son and myself, then prepare the same breakfast for him every morning: porridge with yoghurt, honey, apples and bananas. This gets him through the school day, and I don’t have to think early in the morning because I know this breakfast by heart. At 7:30am, I also leave the house and go to the swimming pool. In the small 25-metre pool, I swim two kilometres every morning, back and forth for an hour, eighty laps. After that, my head is clear and I’m ready to write – five hours of writing. If I’m lucky, I can manage seven pages; if not, it’s only three or four, but I have to accept that. Later, around 3pm, I take care of everything else that a single mum has to do: shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing up. The next day, it all starts again. That’s my rather unglamorous life as a working writer.
I hope you’ll enjoy Sharks, my story about property and murder – and about a coughing Riley torn between two men.
If you want to read other books by German authors, here are the best ones from my bookshelf (all translated into English):
Eva Menasse, Darkenbloom, translated by Charlotte Collins (Scribe)
Jackie Thomae, Brothers, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (DAS)
Mariana Leky, What You Can See from Here,translated by Tess Lewis (Bloomsbury)
Judith Hermann, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, translated by Katy Derbyshire (Granta)
Wolfgang Herrndorf, Why We Took the Car, translated by Tim Mohr (Andersen Press)
Cheers and take care,
Simone Buchholz
Hamburg, February 2026
Simone Buchholz is the author Sharks, translated by Rachel Ward, the third book in the Chastity Reloaded series and her eight book about Chastity Riley to be published in English by Orenda Books.
