Leavers’ Ball
“People tell each other stories in order to survive—but for death they need music."
Marten feels most at home in graveyards: they are quiet and their trees offer plenty of shade. Even as a child he was the odd one out—and as an adult he takes up the profession that fits him like a lid fits a coffin: he becomes a funeral bugler, playing a last song for the dead. But when Marten finds a bank card belonging to his just-buried former classmate Wilhelm, it marks the start of a bizarre odyssey. Through no fault of his own, he is drawn up in a maelstrom of peculiar events and forced to confront everything he’s taken such great pains to avoid all his life: other people, money, adventure—and love.
A funny and poignant novel about one of life’s conscientious objectors, an extraordinary, eccentric character who experiences the adventure of a lifetime over the course of a single summer.
• a novel about music, funeral songs and taking life one step at a time
• a graveyard bugler experiences the adventure of a lifetime
• highly original, offbeat and heart-warming