I don't usually do this.

Recommend books, that is. OK, yes I do, but only to S and because she is my child and because I have watched how as a fairly small person she discovered reading and books, the whole magic and all that stuff. I still remember the exact day she suddenly stopped reading aloud  - she used to walk around on the smooth lino floor of the little bungalow in paradise, geckos climbing the walls, the noises from chickens and dogs and kids and whatever floating in through the open louvre windows, holding up her book and reading at the top of her voice - and suddenly she sat down and I watched her getting lost in silence, deep inside the story.

Another time, some years later, she came running from her bedroom telling us that someone in the Ingalls family now had a driving licence and how come nobody told her. This was the time when the prairie life was reenacted in granddad's garden with blizzards blowing through the rose beds and the raspberries.

So now I have read a teenage novel in one go and want the whole world to read it. Thankfully, it has been translated quite nicely so I don't have to do that - I was seriously considering it for a split second (and would have failed dramatically). For understandable reasons, the English language version is Why we took the car.

The author, Wolfgang Herrndorf has moved my heart and soul and the heart and soul of so many others last year with his blog. Which ended on the day he shot himself. He started the blog after he was diagnosed with a most aggressive brain tumour. Early on he wrote that he always felt that life needs uncertainty and hope but that while it is possible to live without, there is only half the fun in it. Sorry, I garbled this but sometimes the powers of translation fail me.

Anyway, the book is all about life, glorious, wild, abundant life and the story has nothing to do with death and illness. Recommending it feels like passing on a secret.