Wetlands

Wetlands-an international sensation with more than a million copies sold worldwide--has been at the center of a heated debate about feminism and sexuality since its publication last spring. Charlotte Roche's controversial debut novel is the story of Helen Memel, an outspoken, sexually precocious eighteen-year-old lying in a hospital bed as she recovers from an operation. To distract herself, she ruminates on her past sexual and physical adventures in increasingly uncomfortable detail. The result is a funny, shocking, and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the compulsion to obliterate the covenant that keeps girls clean, quiet, and nice.

About the Author :
Charlotte Roche, born in High Wycombe but raised in Germany, has been a recognizable face in her adopted home country since she started working as a presenter on Viva, the German equivalent of MTV, in the mid-1990s. She went on to write and present programs and late-night talk shows for Arte and ZDF, and won the highly respected Grimme Prize for television in 2004.

Review :
"Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-eighteen audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best-seller Wetlands . . . a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper. . . . With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel's eighteen-year-old narrator, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. . . . Ardent fans have shown up to her readings with avocados as presents and, in several instances documented in the local media, the unprepared have fainted at some of the scenes."-Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times "An explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the perversion of J.G. Ballard's Crash and the feminist agenda of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. . . . [Wetlands] hasn't been out of Germany's newspapers since publication."--Philip Oltermann, Granta "Using language explicit enough to make the Mayflower Madam blush . . . the sassy if confessional tone [of Wetlands] introduces a 21st century Lolita whose bravado is slowly chipped away. . . . Intense . . . Exhilarating, moving, sad, and scary."--Library Journal "A sharply-written, taboo-busting black comedy, both gross and engrossing. . . . [Helen Memmel] is Florence Nightingale's worst nightmare. . . . Wetlands, in the tradition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, is a remarkable novel about mental illness that has been mistaken for feminist literature."--Alice O'Keefe, Newstatesman "'Provocative' is one of those publishing buzzwords reflexively used to stir up interest in the most banal of books. [But for Wetlands] the overused descriptor is tepid. . . . The novel's utterly original, occasionally stomach-churning imagery [is] . . . probably not for Oprah's book club."--Anne Kingston, Maclean's (Canada) "Profoundly unsettling."--Rowan Pelling, Daily Mail (UK) "If you ever wondered what you'd be like if you weren't shy, polite, tolerant, modest, sexually repressed, logical, and constrained by modern standards of hygiene, this may be the book for you. . . . This is not a beautiful or perfect book, but an enterprising one, and its cumulative effect is admirable. . . . Our bodies mean a lot to us--even the asshole, about which far too little has been written. Every writer needs to claim a bit of territory, and assholes are there for the grabbing. Boldly, Roche takes them for her own."--The Guardian (UK) "Roche has created a female lead that is likeable and funny, flawed and idiosyncratic. She manages to win you over because of, not despite of, the gross stuff. . . . Helen speaks abut female sexuality in a way that is rarely heard. . . . [Wetlands] is an easy page turner of a read, with a [heroine] who doesn't conform to mainstream ideas of femininity and a great mixture of the gross and erotic."--Subtext Magazine "Wetlands made me squirm-in-my-seat uncomfortable--and I loved every minute of it! Roche turns expectations about women and sexuality on their head, and does it with a frankness that's brave and hilarious. In a world where women's bodies are supposed to be nipped, tucked, shaved and douched, Wetlands is a much needed antidote."--Jes