Charlotte Nowak, 15 and incredibly shy, reluctantly heads off to summer camp with seven other girls. When she gets there, she finds that things a very different to how she’d imagined. First, things start to go missing. And when their group leader completely loses her temper, the girls make their escape, stealing a dog catcher’s van (dogs included) in the process. Literally heading for the hills, one of the girls knows of an old disused mine. The group decides to seek refuge there. Each summer day they spend there seems to heighten their sense of freedom and excitement even further. The girls spend their days trekking through the woods, their nights scavenging supermarket storage containers. Charly Nowak slowly realises that there is a lot more to her than her shyness. But when the gang stumbles across an extraordinary relic of the old Communist East Germany and the real world threatens to catch up with them, Charly has to prove her mettle and display both her newly found courage and her loyalty to her new friends.
Winner of the 2016 German Children’s Literature Award