WHEN JULIA FRANCK WAS AWARDED the German Book Prize in 2007, she was by no means a newcomer to the literary scene. The author had already published three novels and two collections of short stories before her epic tome Die Mittagsfrau (literally, Lady Midday, the noonday witch, 2007; published in English as The Blind Side of the Heart, 2009) earned her Germany’s most prestigious literary award. In selecting Franck’s novel, the jury members were unanimous in their praise of its “vivid use of language, narrative power and psychological intensity,” calling it “a novel for long conversations.” Franck’s powerful depiction of a woman who, against the backdrop of war-torn Germany, comes to the momentous decision to abandon her seven-year-old son at a railway station certainly provides plenty of material for discussion.

Prior to the publication of the novel that earned her the prize, Franck was quite well known in Germany as one of the writers of the so-called Fräuleinwunder generation, the “wonder girls” of contemporary German literature. Volker Hage originally coined the term in a 1999 article in Der Spiegel that drew attention to a group of young women writers, including Karen Duve and Kathrin Schmidt, who were taking the literary scene by storm and whose candid writing, in his view, showed that they had no fear of clichés or strong emotions. Whether or not Hage’s observations about this new generation of women writers were correct, the label of the Fräuleinwunder stuck, and it shaped how contemporary women’s writing in German was read and marketed in the years following the publication of his somewhat problematic article. Publishers and magazines alike complemented interviews with writers and discussions of their literature with glossy photos that promoted the writers as a phenomenon in themselves, the bright stars of Germany’s literary future. Despite the fact that Julia Franck’s name was never mentioned in Hage’s article, she has always been depicted by the media as one of Germany’s wonder girls.

Franck herself has always argued very strongly against the notion of a Fräuleinwunder, asserting that it is nothing more than a marketing label and that it actually undermines the legitimacy of contemporary writing by women.