Wetlands

A sexual, scatological, international sensation: "A cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women's world" (Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times). In the tradition of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and Melissa P.'s 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Charlotte Roche's debut novel--which sold more than a million copies in Germany alone--exposes the double bind of female sexuality, delivering a compulsively readable and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the repercussions of family trauma. Helen Memel is an outspoken eighteen-year-old, whose childlike stubbornness is offset by a precocious sexual confidence. From a hospital bed, where she's recovering from an operation and lamenting her parents' divorce, Helen ruminates on her past sexual and physical adventures in "a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct--both physical and psychological--of Helen's body and mind" (The New York Times). Punky alienated teenager, young woman reclaiming her body from the tyranny of repressive hygiene (women mustn't smell, excrete, desire), bratty smartass, lonely daughter, shock merchant, and pleasure seeker--Helen is all of these things and more, and her frequent attempts to assert her maturity ultimately prove just how fragile, confused, and young she truly is.

About the Author :
Thirty-year-old 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 :
"Wetlands is Roche's scatological counterattack to our ultra-sanitized world. Scandalous, compelling and altogether disturbing, this is a new erotic literary classic." --Diane Anderson-Minshall, Curve "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." --Granta Magazine "Wetlands is first and foremost a romantic book, and it shows that our society is threatened not by the liberalization of sexual inhibitions but rather from a prudishness that hides behind silicon breasts." --Vanity Fair (Germany) "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