Wetlands--an international sensation with more than a million copies sold worldwide--has been at the center of a heated debate about feminism and sexuality since its publication last spring. Charlotte Roche's controversial debut novel is the story of Helen Memel, an outspoken, sexually precocious eighteen-year-old lying in a hospital bed as she recovers from an operation. To distract herself, she ruminates on her past sexual and physical adventures in increasingly uncomfortable detail. The result is a funny, shocking, and fearlessly intimate manifesto on sex, hygiene, and the compulsion to obliterate the covenant that keeps girls clean, quiet, and nice.

From the author of the international bestseller 'Wetlands', a raw and taboo-breaking novel of sex and grief, obsession and death. 'My therapist says I'm trying to escape fear through sex... I could easily have sex ten times a day.' Elizabeth Kiehl is a devoted mother. A committed environmentalist. The ideal wife. So why is she so insecure? Because her daughter has worms? Because the planet is still doomed? Because visiting brothels with her husband makes her feel sick? Or is it that if she stops thinking about absolutely everything else she will remember what happened to her family eight years ago? 'Wrecked' is a raw, uncompromising and blackly comic portrayal of trauma, sexuality and one woman's desperate attempt to cling to something like sanity.

With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel's 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel ('Feuchtgebiete', in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, and is the biggest selling book on Amazon anywhere in the world. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. Wetlands opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and - here is where the debate kicks in - just possibly female empowerment. Clearly the novel has struck a nerve, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women's roles and image in society.