A review by charleslambert
Die Mitte der Welt by Andreas Steinhöfel

4.0

I liked this book a great deal and if I'd been part of its target audience - it's aimed at young adult readers and I'm depressingly far from that demographic - I'm pretty sure I would have loved it, and given it five stars and raved about it to everyone. It's a story about love and secrets, trust and betrayal, a story with as narrator a seventeen-year old boy who is gay and refreshingly free of guilt, although not of desire. It's an odd, but successful mixture of gothic romance, coming of age story and, in its way, celebration of the world. A hymn to what the world offers. At one point, the library in the house that provides the core setting for the novel is referred to as the centre of the world, and this partly explains the title - books and letters play a significant part in the novel - but if the library is the world it's also true that the world is a book or collection of books, and Phil's gradual reading of the world, as it is and as it might be, as the novel develops - perhaps not always as smoothly as it might, but always with heart and nerve - is a joy to witness.