Swimming is a special art. It is not only a sport or a way to stay afloat; it is also the most immediate experience of water and its variability. John von Düffel, author...

Ultimately, this is the story of a father and daughter. Barbara Honigmann describes her childhood in East Berlin, the perpetual travelling back and forth between her separated...

Michael Kaltenbrach, a young lawyer, is travelling to Cologne to meet with a publishing house in the hope that they will take on his short stories. As the train rattles...

Louise was born and raised in Normandy, but now lives in Berlin. One day, quite by chance at a family funeral in Normandy, she meets a distant cousin - Ida - for...

Albert Klein fled Germany in the early 80s because of unrequited love. On his return twelve years later, the place strikes him as even more alien and depressing than before....

"The Crying Animal" is not a travelogue in the conventional sense, but rather, as the author makes plain in the opening pages, a combination of "private travel chronicles,...

What constitutes a family today and who is actually part of it?

Angela and Erich are the parents, Simon and Katrin the children. Together ...

A knock at the door can herald many changes…

Christopher Kloeble tells stories of young people whose lives are abruptly altered. A scream rips...

For years, Albert has been visiting Fred during the holidays and at weekends, but they've never really grown close. Albert only ever called Fred Fred, never Father. Fred...

A book on sex and love and what we take for it

In the mid-eighties Eva is studying art history in West Berlin. The city is on the brink of a major upheaval, ...

On November 21 ^st 1811, on the shores of Lake Wannsee near Potsdam, the writer and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist shot first Henriette Vogel and then himself.

Ludwig doesn't know who he is anymore. Since failing to qualify as a lawyer, he no longer feels in control of his own destiny. Yes, he soon finds employment as the manager of ...

Although he has a brilliant career ahead of him, the young man from Frankfurt is melancholic for no apparent reason. Then he meets a young Turkish woman, with whom he...

Robert Ames is a 37-year-old insurance broker. He lives with his wife Kala and their son Jonathan in an unassuming house in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada).

One Friday...

From trolls, ogres and valkyries to Odin, Thor and Freya, Katharina Neuschaefer relates the stories of the mythical creatures and deities that make up the fabulous world of...

»Munich, that was home.« Here Therese enjoys a comfortable childhood. Her father runs a warehouse and a clothes factory; Thomas Mann and Sauerbruch are regular visitors to...

What if your child is not like other children...  

An inheritance enables Lukas and Paulina to realise a lifetime dream: at long last they can leave behind...

"She was as complicated as a puzzle of several thousand parts, and I had to find these parts and put them together," says Angelika Schrobsdorff about her mother. The...

A novel about the life of Constanze Mozart - an absorbing account based on detailed research.

In retrospect, there are many who might envy her: imagining that it must...

Salzburg 1935 - a hot summer. Three years before Austria's annexation, the festival city is promoting itself as a tranquil retreat. In Leopoldskron Castle, an assortment of...

Belgrade, at the end of the 1990's. Rudi Stupar, a failed drama student, half-hearted scholar of German and full-time flâneur, is drifting aimlessly through life. When...

»Everything that happens to us is a mixture of chance and necessity, but the only thing we can rely on is chance.«

A professor of mathematics in ...

Western Pomeranian, 1999, in the small village of Bresekow. When old Frau Hanske dies, her daughter Ingrid flies in for the funeral with her family from Ireland. Ingrid had...

Julius is the story of a young man striking out on his own. It's also the story of the eponymous protagonist's friendship with Martin, a sports-mad French student....