Chucks tells the story of Mae, who sees her family falling apart after the death of her younger brother. She no longer feels at home in her parental home and spends most of her days in the streets of Vienna. That is where she meets her best friend Tamara, with whom she philosophizes about life over drugs and stale bear. Her relationship with Jakob, who is actually a little too conventional for Mae, breaks down and when she has to do community service in an AIDS hospital, she meets Paul. She falls in love with him and her life takes an unexpected turn. Paul makes her look at the world in a different way, because every day can be his last. Mae already wears her brother’s red trainers each day and now finds herself collecting Paul’s hair and trying to capture the air in his hospital room in a little box. It’s her strategy against forgetting them, because for the second time in her life she will lose a loved one.

The tone in particular makes this novel special. Travnicek succeeds in granting the heavy subject some lightness. Gracefully, she switches between humour, tenderness and insolence, without being sentimental or banal. In this fresh, unpredictable novel Travnicek chooses her words with care and with guts. Mae’s poetic, funny and ever surprising observations will amaze the reader over and over again.