Marie-Louise Monrad Møller's debut novel "Viel wichtiger ist jetzt die Gegenwart" ("The Present Is What Matters Most Now"), published by Berlin's Kanon Verlag, follows a narrator in her early thirties who returns to Schleswig-Holstein (the German region bordering Denmark, home to a historically rooted Danish-speaking minority) as her mother — a beloved local pastor — faces a terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis. The novel alternates between the present of the illness and fragmentary childhood memories triggered by familiar landscapes, gradually complicating an initially idealized portrait of the mother. Drawing on her own experience, Møller captures what she describes as the paradox of grieving someone still alive, weaving together questions of identity, belonging, and the compulsion to archive the present moment through writing.