This short novel from the mid-seventies uses the somewhat medieval plot device of a series of guests at a party taking it in turns to tell one story each. In this case the guests are five women, former classmates now in their late thirties and still living in their old home town, who have got into the routine of meeting once a month for coffee and cakes and gossip. On this particular occasion they invite another woman from their class to join them. Unlike the others, Karla is still single, a journalist who has gone to live in the big city and now writes about "women's issues": she taunts her old classmates for their bourgeois complacency and the "hunting trophies" of jewellery that they've acquired. To her surprise, they don't submit to her rhetoric, but defend themselves, each taking a particular piece of her jewellery and showing how she acquired it, in the process revealing a secret she has never shared with the group before, but also making it clear that there is far more to their lives as middle-class women in seventies Germany than the exchange of sex for ornaments and consumer durables. The stories they tell are all witty and subversive, in quite distinct ways, and the only very slightly buried message the reader is supposed to pick up is that feminism is about what happens in the lives of ordinary women, not fancy intellectual theories. Possibly a bit simplistic, and definitely a document of the time it was written in (so it might lose some of its impact if you don't remember provincial German society ca. 1975), but very entertaining, and extremely acutely observed. ( )