For some odd reason my reads of three years ago told without exception sad, if not depressing stories. My first read in May 2014 was Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, a much acclaimed English classic from 1939 that surrounds a lonely Englishwoman in Paris. Also the 1974 Austrian novel Beautiful Days by Franz Innerhofer was far from a cheerful read evoking the horrors of the author’s own childhood on a mountain farm in the 1950s. Before You Sleep by Linn Ullmann, first published in 1998, is another story of the scars that even small childhood traumas leave on a soul, but at the same time it’s a family history of three generations coping with the vicissitudes of life. While Before You Sleep was only faintly surrealistic, Mood Indigo by Boris Vian turned out to be a chef-d’oeuvre of French surrealism that first appeared in 1947. The story of love and friendship takes a splendid turn from sunny and clear to overcast and gloomy. And last but not least, I read The Church of Solitude by Grazia Deledda, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1926. The protagonist of this late novel is a young Sardinian woman who had breast cancer – like the author herself who even died from it eventually.