“A unique voice, full of deeply sensual and unconventional descriptions and analogies. A revelation!”
- Britta Spichiger, SRF Literatur
“Yael Inokai illuminates the women in this book with her limpid sentences; she writes with a steady hand, never shying away from the darkness.”
- Dorothee Elmiger
"Through her narrative voice, Inokai produces an ambivalent impression of a futuristic past. There are traces of A Handmaid’s Tale in the way she doesn’t specify whether the setting is historical or dystopian. This clever act of abstraction filters out time and place, so that the novel ends up imitating its own subject matter. The narrator’s voice never intrudes into the love story in order to proclaim judgement or appeal to convention: the love story consists of pure emotion and trembling acknowledgements of each other’s body, and after an unforgettable sex scene there’s a moment of shame, alienation and awakening."
- Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung
"A tale as delicate as it is brutal. At first glance, it seems anachronistic – and is all the more unsettling for it. Surely we left those times behind us long ago. Or did we?"
- Presse am Sonntag
"In a vivid and condensed style, Inokai writes about faith and doubt in an authoritarian society – terrifying and gripping, but with a feminist silver lining on the horizon."
- Deutschlandfunk Kultur
"In short, rhythmic sentences, Inokai tells the story of structural oppression and the power that springs from two people coming together, inserting A Simple Intervention into the contemporary debate around power structures, emancipation and interpretative hegemony."
- Lara Sielmann, tip Berlin
An award-winning author explores a risky medical intervention that changes the life of three women forever.
A novel about deep-seated misogyny and the emancipatory power of love and empathy.
Meret is a nurse. The clinic is her home, she wears her uniform with pride, and no one knows more than her about how people can suffer. Until one day a new kind of intervention is developed, aimed at releasing women from psychological distress. Its secondary effects can be painful, but then patients start to heal. Meret holds onto this thought, even as she slowly begins to have her doubts about it.
A Simple Intervention is not just the story of a young woman who, in a world of strict hierarchies and dehumanised female patients, begins to lose her belief in the power of medicine. It is also an intense evocation of a love with its own unique rules: Meret falls in love with another female nurse. And in so doing, she oversteps an invisible boundary.