With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits from the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Charlotte Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany.

The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s mind and body. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. Wetlands opens inside a hospital room after a romantic shaving accident. It offers an in depth topography of Helen’s hemorrhoids, continues into the subject matter of anal sex and only benefits momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female intimate satisfaction and – here is where the debate kicks in – simply possibly feminine empowerment. Clearly the book offers struck a nerve, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the argument over women’s tasks and picture in society.