The ceiling is not especially beautiful. Its plaster ornament has been painted so often that the flowers have lost their definition. From the exercise mat on the floor, Juno sees them as planets moving around their orbits.
Next door, the motor of her husband's care bed makes a noise. He is awake too.
This is the scale of Martina Hefter's opening: a few rooms in Leipzig, two people unable to sleep, and a mind capable of turning damaged decoration into a small solar system. Then Juno reaches for her phone. Somewhere beyond the apartment, a stranger has sent her another flattering message.
She knows the routine. The respectable photograph, the extravagant interest, the life story designed to make an unfamiliar man seem desirable: she has seen a documentary about romance scams. Knowing does not lead her straight to the block button. Instead, she answers.
The original German novel, Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?, appeared in 2024. Its English edition, translated by Linda L. Gaus, is titled Hey, Good Morning, How Are You? The greeting is ordinary enough to disappear into a busy day. Here it enters hours in which someone has rather too much time to hear it.
A better story than the scammer expected
Juno begins by inventing a life so excessive that the men's willingness to believe it becomes funny. She owns valuable falcons. She lives with servants. If they want a prosperous European woman, she can produce one whose prosperity has become ridiculous.
There is pleasure in making the liar lose his footing. It is not entirely generous pleasure, and the German opening made available by Litrix does not clean it up. Juno likes being the person who understands the game. She enjoys testing how implausible she can become before the other player notices.
That capacity for mischief is important. A synopsis could make her sound like a case study: a woman in her fifties, a dancer and performance artist, caring for a husband with multiple sclerosis, finding temporary escape online. The excerpt supplies a less exemplary person, one with impatience, vanity, humor, and an appetite for annoying somebody.
The chats themselves are not uniformly sparkling. A thought is met by an emoji. A question arrives from a different conversation than the one Juno thinks she is having. She may want to talk about a film or an unsettling idea; the response suggests that the person at the other end is waiting to resume a familiar script.
That mismatch gives the exchange a peculiar rhythm. Messages keep coming, yet being answered is not always the same as being heard. The tiny interval between the two can be comic, humiliating, or oddly seductive.
The disguise also lets Juno say things without first fitting them into the life people already know. Friends and family have an account of who she is. A new profile does not. For a while, she can speak without immediately being returned to the place she occupies in someone else's day.
But her own words begin to interest her. They are not all there simply to waste a scammer's time. What she wishes for can enter a fabricated biography; an invented life can contain a true sentence. At that point, it becomes harder to describe the exchange as a game happening only at the other person's expense.
Then there is Benu, a man in Nigeria. When the false identity is exposed, the conversation does not end in the usual way. Some attention persists. That small deviation is a stronger invitation to read than a promise that deception will magically turn into true love.
A holiday does not take the worry away
The screen is only one place where the opening asks us to notice differences of attention. The apartment, and the physical work of sharing it, remain close.
Jupiter uses a wheelchair and a care bed. Yet describing him as entirely helpless would erase something the excerpt takes care to preserve. When Juno spends a few days with her mother in the mountains, he can still prepare simple food for himself. Some movements have become difficult; others remain possible.
The difference changes how we understand care. It is not a permanent arrangement in which one person acts and the other only receives. It involves particular objects, changing abilities, and the knowledge that a task can become dangerous when no one is nearby to help.
At home, Juno's presence provides a kind of backup. Away, she imagines what might happen if he falls. The same kitchen contains the same objects, but an accident would unfold differently without a second person within calling distance.
She has gone to the mountains hoping to sleep. Instead, worry travels with her. The new room does not give her the simple permission to rest that a change of scenery appears to promise.
This is one of the strongest reasons to try the book's beginning. It allows the wish to get away and the wish to remain available to occupy the same person without making either one fraudulent. Needing time alone need not reduce her attachment. Attachment need not make time alone unnecessary.
Juno's own body has another life too. Dance is work, training, and a way of feeling present. Its repeated movements are not merely the physical contrast to Jupiter's restricted mobility. They belong to what she wants from her days.
To call her only a caregiver would make this part of her life an accessory. To describe her only as an artist seeking freedom would make the apartment and her husband look like obstacles placed in the path of a more authentic existence. The concrete scenes resist both reductions.
The phone rests somewhere inside this arrangement. It does not transport her to a place outside responsibility. Nor does every exchange have to be interpreted as a grand rebellion. Sometimes the important fact is simply that she has something she wants to say and has found an unexpected person willing to remain on the line.
What should we call this connection?
Put Juno, Jupiter, and Benu into a sentence and a familiar shape immediately appears: a triangle. The word suggests desires, rivalries, and a choice between two men. It may organize our expectations before we have learned whether the people fit it.
In her NDR interview with Maren Ahring, Hefter resists that expectation. From Juno's side, she says, this is not a relationship driven by sexual or conventional romantic desire. Friendship is closer, with room for forms of love that are not synonymous with partnership.
Her answer does not tell us everything about the relationship. It makes space for reading before naming. We can ask what one person offers another without assuming that the offer must be heading toward a familiar romantic destination.
The distance between Germany and Nigeria still matters. Each participant brings ideas about the world on the other side of the screen. Their material circumstances are not interchangeable, and mutual curiosity does not remove that difference.
Hefter also describes replying to scam accounts herself. Curiosity mixed with irritation; she was surprised that the people receiving her inventions continued to believe them. That experience supplied a starting point for fiction, not a requirement that every event in Juno's life be mapped onto the author's.
The interest lies in what a conversation can become after its initial purpose grows unstable. Someone starts out hoping to extract money. Someone else intends to expose foolishness. A question receives an unexpectedly particular answer, and both now have something further to respond to.
None of this makes emotional or financial exploitation harmless. A reader can remain interested in the person behind a fraudulent account while recognizing the damage such accounts cause. The more demanding possibility is to hold both thoughts without allowing one to cancel the other.
Lightness, repetition, and their limits
The public excerpt moves between chat messages, bodily routines, rooms, memories, and associations. It is told in a third person close to Juno, not as an uninterrupted sequence of phone conversations. The reader spends time with the mind that sends a message, not only with the words appearing on the screen.
Its repetitions may be part of the attraction. We return to a body, a room, another wakeful hour. A familiar action takes on a slightly different feeling because of what has passed through Juno's attention since the last time she performed it.
For a view of the full novel, the critical disagreement is useful. Wolfgang Schneider's SWR Kultur review praises a performance-like interplay of themes and the humor sustained amid difficult material. Katharina Teutsch's Deutschlandfunk Kultur review finds the repeated conversations and training dull, and Benu's perspective insufficiently developed.
These are different assessments, not two halves of a guaranteed verdict. They suggest what to watch for when trying the opening: whether the pauses accumulate feeling for you, or whether you begin to wish the book would leave its recurrent motions behind.
The ceiling offers a small example of the pleasure available. Juno has not left her apartment, but its worn decoration has become something she can look at differently. The movement is in her attention.
So is the change in a greeting. The words can remain exactly as conventional as before. What alters is the person waiting for an answer, and what that person is now willing to hear.