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Alexa Hennig von Lange, THE MAD ONE

Dumont - Novel - Hardcover - August 2020 - 200 pages

Spain, 1502: In the fortress of La Mota, Joanna of Castile should finally come to her senses. Too much is at stake for her mother, Isabella the Catholic. The queen rules the country with unrelenting toughness. She has driven out the Moors and has thousands burned at the stake of the Inquisition. She cannot give her kingdom into the hands of her daughter Joanna, who does not pray, does not confess and does not value power. Joanna does not want to rule over others. All she wants is to rule over herself. But that seems to be a freedom reserved for men only.
When she is married to Philip the Fair to distant Flanders, it seems for a moment that the improbable is possible: a life of love in a world of betrayal. But even when that hope does not come true, Johanna holds on to what everyone around her thinks is madness - the outrageous wish that the world could be different.

Against this historical background, Alexa Hennig von Lange asks a very modern question: How can we become who we are if this is not intended for us?

  • A woman's struggle for self-determination - and the rule over half a continent

  • Maybe Johanna was mad. Or maybe she was just madly in love.

  • Joanna The Mad - A Tale from The Middle Ages as a Mirror of Our Time 

  • “Orchestrated like a Netflix series.” - Tagesspiegel

  • “Alexa Hennig von Lange tells in a captivating and empathic way on unfortunately only 200 pages of the fate of an unbending woman who provokes agitation and asks questions that reach up to the present day.” - STERN

  • „Hennig von Lange has succeeded in making a long-faded life and fate present and comprehensible. Hennig von Lange writes something like the first historical pop novel.” - WELTWOCHE

  • “Alexa Hennig von Lange’s Joanna The Mad suffers in a modern way because the pursuit of freedom is timeless.” - ORF ZIB

  • “What a reading pleasure!” - WOMAN

  • “In her slim book, Hennig von Lange actually succeeds in something like a salvation of honour: in her eyes, Johanna is a woman with very modern, but perhaps only universal feelings, who seriously loves and is betrayed, who has to emancipate herself from her mother and accept her own motherhood.” - Hannoversche Neue Presse

Rights sold to: Italy (Casa Editrice Nord)