Phlox

It’s going to be the final visit to Schmogrow for Richard Sparka and his family. He travels to the comfortingly familiar childhood paradise with Karla and their two children, Karl and Ricarda.

The Tatziets have now died and the house and its land have been sold off. Over decades they had built up this holiday idyll, a haven for those in search of the good life. Richard, although embroiled at times in disagreements with Klara over the finer points of child-rearing and often bedevilled by his children’s determined views, remains dead set on carrying on with his personal crusade against the ‘uglification’ of the world by creating a special memorial to ‘The Miracle of Schmogrow’. Once they arrive, he manages to unearth some sort of archive of the place’s history and revels in the spiritual and practical wisdom of the Tatziet family, researching further into the delight that is Schmogrow but, in doing so, discovers how much of the back to nature, self-sufficiency paradise with its passion for sustainability and opposition to wastefulness actually has a darker side…both funny and serious, historically aware and yet highly topical, lovingly detailed but with an eye to the big issues, Jochen Schmidt writes of the eternal search for the ‘good life’.