When I read the first page of “Her friends”, I thought I’d probably just put it down amongst the pile of other manuscripts – but it trapped me, it sunk its claws into me. I had to read further. The first chapter. The second chapter. The more I read, the more I was pulled into a strange and terrible world – exquisitely beautiful, like fine, fragile porcelain, yet shocking in its violence and sexuality. The book has captured me. The book has haunted me, and I am compelled to publish it. It’s one of those few books that comes along rarely in life, that makes you wonder, while you turn the pages so quickly, trying to find out how the story unfolds, whether you’re devouring it, or if, in reality, it’s devouring you. Although “Her Friends” is the first, and, possibly, the last book by S. Cohen, there is a fairly good chance that you already own and love some of this author’s previous works.
“Johannes Neumann considers the beauty and fragility of the Dresden porcelain figurines he collects, while he sits by the hospital bed of his pregnant wife, Katarina. She’s in a coma after a terrorist bombing, unmoving, unspeaking. Or is she? In his dreams, Katarina comes to him, trying to tell him something, filling him with yearning. She haunts him, leaving clues to her life – a life he never knew much about. He feels compelled to find Katarina’s four best friends from high school, to reach out to them, to know them, in a bid to finally understand her, before he can make the ultimate decision about her and their unborn child. At once a condemnation of terrorism and the emptiness of “friendships” on social media, the book is an exploration into loss through eroticism. It’s the journey of one man, shaken from a smothering asceticism and thrown into a violent and sometimes horrifying world.”