Nem Todas as Árvores Morrem de Pé (2025)

The singer’s dazzling debut in fiction.

This is a novel about two women united by disillusionment and the saddest fifty years in German history. With a very original structure and an unforgettable gallery of characters, “Nem Todas as Árvores Morrem de Pé” marks Luísa Sobral’s dazzling debut in fiction.

Emmi, who was born shortly before Hitler came to power in Germany, loses her father in the war and has a difficult adolescence, working from an early age to help around the house. It is in a bar where he goes with his friends after work that he meets Markus, a man from East Berlin who writes him wonderful letters and with whom he falls madly in love.

Although her mother turns up her nose at her marriage at a time when the Cold War is raging, her sister supports her, and Emmi ends up living with Mischa in the GDR. Initially, everything went well, but after the Berlin Wall was erected, the separation from her family and the arrival of an anonymous letter left her in the deepest depression.

M. was born after the division of the two Germanys and is the perfect fruit of socialism: with an absent mother and raised by a nurse who loves plants, M. idolizes her father, completely unaware of the Western world and growing up in a distorted reality. Until one day, when he hears the shocking testimony of a girl, he discovers that, after all, it is not only the Wall that has another side.

Edition: Don Quixote