What Concerns Us
Rahel and Fenna grew up in an all-female household with their mother and her female partner. Now Rahel strives to reproduce the traditional family unit but she is haunted by an unsettling pregnancy, postnatal depression and compulsive breastfeeding, while having mixed feelings about her singing career. Will she ever recover her own voice after motherhood? Meanwhile, Fenna, a declared feminist, wonders whether she consented to the intercourse with Luc which left her pregnant. What Concerns Us is a punchy contemporary read that scrutinises gender roles within our society, examining what it means to be a mother and the nature of femininity, as well as how to remain independent in a variety of different types of relationship.
Laura Vogt
Laura Vogt (Teufen, 1989) studied Creative Writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel and Cultural Studies at the University of Lucerne. Her first novel, So einfach war es also zu gehen, came out in 2016. She has also written numerous short stories and articles as well as lyrical and dramatic texts. Laura started writing What Concerns Us two months after having her first child. This is her second novel, and the first one to be available to English readers.
Translated by Caroline Waight, who is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, German and Norwegian. She translates both fiction and non-fiction, with recent publications including The Lobster’s Shell by Caroline Albertine Minor (Granta, 2022), Island by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen (Pushkin Press, 2021) and The Chief Witness by Sayragul Sauytbay and Alexandra Cavelius (Scribe, 2021).
Author portrait © Ayse Yavas