Just published: #1 Spiegel bestseller, more than 130,000 copies sold
Dörte Hansen's books have sold over 2,9 million copies and have been filmed and translated into 13 languages
“Dörte Hansen has achieved a remarkable novel with Broder, recounting transformation and loss with irresistible clarity. She never writes a word too many, nor a word too few [...] Her images are as unusual as they are movingly memorable. Read Dörte Hansen. Unmissable.” - NDR Kultur
“Anyone who can still appreciate a finely crafted work of narrative art with a self-contained structure must admire this one.” - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Broder is a moving literary meditation on change, transience, and the limits of growth.” - Neue Zürcher Zeitung
A poignant, intense tale of a complicated relationship between two brothers, rivalry, trust, loss and betrayal
All Broder Bahnsen has ever wanted is to be a farmer, to succeed the father from whom he has inherited his ‘cow sense’, his instinct for animals. But it’s his twin brother Henning, born just a few minutes earlier, who’s destined to inherit the farm. Henning has always been the confident one, but is more interested in machines than in cattle.
Exiled from the farm, Broder creates a counter-life for himself. He becomes a vet and stays away from the family business for more than two decades. When he returns to the area and takes over a practice near the Bahnsen farm, he ends up looking after his brother’s herd too. Henning, meanwhile, has turned their parents’ place into a hyper-modern business with cows bred to maximise milk production.
But success comes at a price, and Broder notices that Henning is beginning to lose control over the farm. Is this what he’s been waiting for all these years? Is this his chance to take his brother’s place? Or has he, like his daughter Claire, started questioning the ethics of breeding cattle in this way?
Broder is a clear-eyed, insightful novel about a world where our fixation on growth finds its limits, and which asks ever more insistently to what extent we’re willing to take responsibility for Creation.