Sex is the answer to death.–Charlotte Roche In her controversial first novel, Wetlands, which The New York Times called a cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women’s world , Roche wrote about sex and the female body in an unprecedentedly frank and intimate way. Roche’s second novel, Wrecked is just as raw and powerful as her debut, but is a more mature and impressive work that deals with sex, death, fidelity, and the question of what is expected from a twenty-first century wife and mother.

It’s easier to give a blow job than to make coffee. That’s what Elizabeth Kiehl, mother of seven-year-old Liza thinks to herself, after a particularly lengthy and inventive bout of sex with her husband Georg–recounted in detail over the book’s first twenty pages. Elizabeth goes to great efforts to pleasure her husband in the bedroom, and also is an extremely thoughtful and caring mother to her daughter. But the perfect mother and wife act she puts on hides a painful past and a tragic rift in her psyche, which she is working through in weekly sessions with her therapist. Sex is the other tool that she uses to relax herself. Elizabeth and Georg watch porn together, and even go off on joint trips to a local brothel for threesomes with prostitutes while their daughter is at school. But is their relationship unhealthy, even tragic, or just a very modern marriage?