Favorita
Switzerland

Favorita

by Michelle Steinbeck

Summary

When Fila receives a mysterious phone call informing her that her estranged mother, Magdalena, has been murdered, she must confront a family history she has spent years trying to escape. Raised by her grandmother in Switzerland, Fila has barely seen her mother since Magdalena scandalised the family by advertising her brothel in a newspaper. Now, carrying her mother’s ashes, Fila travels to Italy to retrace Magdalena’s turbulent life and discover the truth about her death.

Her journey becomes a surreal, feverish odyssey populated by feminist revolutionaries, ghosts, fascist deserters, and forgotten victims of violence. As Fila investigates her mother’s past, she uncovers a wider history of patriarchal oppression and violence against women.

Blending magical realism, dark humour, historical fiction, and feminist revenge, Favorita explores the complicated inheritance between mothers and daughters, the persistence of trauma across generations, and the struggle to reclaim women’s stories from the forces that seek to silence them.

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Michelle Steinbeck
Michelle Steinbeck

Michelle Steinbeck is a Swiss writer born in 1990 and raised in Zurich. She writes novels, poetry, plays, essays, and journalistic pieces, combining surreal imagery, dark humour, and unconventional storytelling to explore identity, power, and the human experience. Her debut novel, My Father Was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water, attracted international attention and was nominated for both the Swiss Book Prize and the German Book Prize in 2016. Her poetry collection Eingesperrte Vögel singen mehr followed in 2018. Her writing has been translated into several languages, and she has appeared at literary events across three continents. Steinbeck is a columnist for the Swiss weekly newspaper WOZ Die Wochenzeitung and co-founded RAUF, a feminist writers’ collective based in Zurich. She has studied philosophy and sociology and lives in Basel. Her second novel, Favorita, combines surrealism and feminist political critique to examine family history, patriarchal violence, and the stories inherited across generations of women.

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Published
2026
Author
Michelle Steinbeck