Long Days is a razor sharp observation and powerful critique of the silences that punctuate our everyday lives, the truths those silences can mask and the gulfs in understanding those missing truths can result in. The themes are easily recognisable because of their domesticity, and easily accessible because of their universality. Long Days is a fantastic collection of short stories from one of Europe's most promising young writers.

Wetzel's characters and settings are thoroughly contemporary, but her stories tap into the great themes of literature. In tales from modern everyday life, she explores questions of identity, role-playing and perspective. The stories are easy to read, but impossible to forget. Maike Wetzel is a talented young author whose writing fascinates and unnerves.

Wonderfully written and observed in a condensed way.

This is the special art of the young writer Maike Wetzel who was well acclaimed for her literary debut Weddings three years ago: to demonstrate vividly how events and stories can affect people – especially if they were only passively involved. (…) Maike Wetzel achieves a double-bottomed quality – sometimes the narration seems to take place on different layers at the same time.

With Maike Wetzel everything is illuminated: Stories about ordinary life. If you watch the cover of her new book, you understand where the magic of her stories derives from.

Maike Wetzel writes laconic but at the same time: maidenly in love with words. They absorb the reader, open spaces for associations. (…) One wishes Maike Wetzel may continue to touch the sore points of her generation and of our time.

Her tools are always trustworthy: Because the writer doesn’t want to belittle the reader, she also doesn’t flatter him with any arabescs. The style seems simple, but in fact is very knowledgable: laconic, short, almost rude.

Maike Wetzel has a feeling for the uncanny and the weird when telling about everyday life. She creates a special atmosphere without making a fuss.