An entire life in one book, more than 80 years. A girl whose feet were bound – feet that still hurt even as an adult woman, a forced marriage, dispossession and humiliation at the hands of the state. Shi Mei has written down this life, in her debut novel in German, „Tamarisk in der Wueste,“ which will be published this fall. And if Shi had been asked many years ago whether she would one day write a book, even one closely interwoven with her own family history, she would probably have decidedly shaken her head.