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 morning, he sets off for work as usual - little does he know that his life will never be the same again. He will fall in love ...

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

Angela and Erich are the parents, Simon and Katrin the children. Together they make up a family. But just listing the members doesn't mean it is a proper family. Erich and Angela have ...

In her new novel, Antje Rávic Strubel gives us a highjacked plane and a difficult, if not impossible, quest for the truth. She has taken a real story as her inspiration: in 1978 a Tupolew 134 was hijacked by two citizens from East Germany who were on a flight from Gdansk to West Berlin. The ...

An Indian orphan boy on a journey of a lifetime

Bartholomäus is an orphan boy from Bombay, about twelve years old, and he speaks almost as many languages. Th is is why he is hired by the German Schlagintweit brothers, who, with the support of Alexander von Humboldt, are setting o? on the ...

"I was always alone. With my mother. My mother was always alone. With me. My mother lived for me and destroyed her life. But not mine. Someone else did that."As a child, Wolf slept during the day and was awake at night. He was only allowed to leave their apartment if he put on a motorcycle ...

Jochen, Oliver, Bill - almost half of the human race is composed of men. They still set the tone for many issues, even though their facade started to crack a long time ago. Enough of a reason to look more closely. What facets characterize the other gender? With a woman's eyes, Johanna Adorján ...

David Ostrich, an Orientalist from Toronto, is about to investigate the legends from the book of Genesis on the Persian Gulf, when he receives an astonishing commission from the supervisor of a giant dam construction. Ostrich is asked to track down the supervisor's missing daughter and, while ...

A beer cellar, a luxury hotel and a grandmother who dies twice over…

Resplendent with glamour but overcast by many a shadow, the story of the Salz family centres on Leipzig's up-market Fürstenhof hotel. Salz Sr. buys it in 1914, but his actress daughter Lola refuses to ...

"You're a damned liar!" Just as Louis de Montesanto is about to start his lecture in front of the venerable Royal Geographical Society, a heckler exposes him as a charlatan. The small man with the massive head was born in a small Swiss mountain village in 1849 under the name of Hans Roth, and ...

The horrors and magic of the past

Artists, loners, highly gifted individuals - Stefan aus dem Siepen's heroes pursue extraordinary passions, which all too often threaten their very existence. An insect collector's life is thrown into question when he realizes that, despite all of ...

The lives of other - the loves of others

Relationship stories, twisted love stories, stories about loneliness, and stories about the hunger for stories. Andreas Schimmelbusch's heroes are on the run: from themselves, from their lives. They are driven across great distances ...

"Hartmut lived with us. Yesterday he set himself on fire."

When it comes to soccer, ten-year-old Hanno Kelsterberg knows everything there is to know. This is also true when it comes to staging demonstrations. For the past two years, the ascetic protester Hartmut Gründler has been ...