Krien has themes that appear in all her novels and it is these that always make me reach for her writing when published. Crisis points in long marriages, the effects of German reunification on generations of family values begun in East Germany and the many unresolved and divergent aspects of the human condition when life does not go as expected. All of these aspects appear within My Third Life - grief however defines the work. Everyone deals with loss in their own way but how does a marriage survive the death of a teenage daughter, killed by a lorry when on her bike? I found her telling, by drilling right down into the suffering and how to move forward forensic, empathetic and granular raw rather than plain bleak. There is a special skill in achieving this reaction in a reader which I so admire. This Third Life emphasises how our psyches and responses change along with a cataclysmic event. Linda's hair turns grey overnight but beneath that she no longer recognises the person she was previously, nor the person she has become. A fascinating riff on when we change, do our previous solid connections survive the transition