Die hellen Tage

the long version

"In a small south German town, a young girl named Seri is the experiencing bright days of her childhood in the garden of her friend Aya, who comes from a Hungarian artist's family, and Seri lives with her mother in a shack on the outskirts of town. But even the seemingly perfect world of their childhood in the 1960s has an invisible jump: Seri's father died shortly after birth, and Aja's father, who works as a trapeze artist in a circus, only comes once a year to visit. Karl, the common friend of the girls who has lost his younger brother, has left on a bright blue spring day in a foreign car and never came back. They are the mothers who guide Karl by the currents and shoals of their childhood and teach him to have to have no fear of life and to travel to its center."--Cataloger translation of publisher description.