{ "item_title" : "What Was Normal", "item_author" : [" Quirli's Creator "], "item_description" : "One second is enough to bring it all back.Nico is forty-five years old. He sits at his kitchen table. Outside, it's raining. And then, through the open window, he smells it: diesel. Just a second. No more.But that one second is enough.Suddenly he is back. Back in a small German village in the 1980s. Back in the passenger seat of his father's truck, high above the road, believing his father knows everything. His father: a truck driver, a storyteller, the man everyone loved. Warm hands on the wheel. A laugh that explained nothing and promised nothing. A man who was simply, entirely, there.His mother was always there too. Quietly. Steadily. Carrying everything without a word.Back then, Nico didn't question any of it. The late evenings. The smell on his coat when he came home. The way his mother waited, her arms folded, her eyes on the door. That was just how things were. That was normal.Only decades later does he begin to understand what he accepted as a child without ever naming it. That some things only get their right name when you're grown. That you can love a father who was not everything he should have been. And that you can love a childhood - without having to keep all of it.What Was Normal is a quiet, precise literary novel from Germany - about memory, silence, and the loyalty that holds a family together even when it shouldn't. Told in short, restrained prose that trusts the reader to feel what is never said out loud.For readers of Shuggie Bain, A Little Life, and The Remains of the DayA coming-of-age story told from both sides of childhood - the child who lived it, and the adult who finally understands itSet in rural Germany, 1985-2000 - a world of diesel and silence, of fathers who drove through the night and mothers who waited without complaintOver 300 pages of atmospheric, emotionally precise literary fictionNormal doesn't mean something is fine. It only means you've stopped questioning it.If you've ever looked back at your childhood and seen it differently - What Was Normal is the novel you've been waiting for.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/530/9798185306369_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "22.00", "online_price" : "22.00", "our_price" : "22.00", "club_price" : "22.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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