“Do you have a handkerchief?” was the question Herta Müller’s mother asked her every day before she left the house. Hardened by five years in a Soviet labor camp, her mother rarely showed affection. “Love disguised itself as a question. That was the only way it could be spoken: matter-of-factly, in the tone of a command, or the deft maneuvers used for work,” Müller said in her speech after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009. Book cover featuring a background photo of a lush green