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 ...

The yo-yo effect is something many have painfully experienced at first hand after a diet, but are you also familiar with the big-fish-little-pond effect, the Mona Lisa syndrome and the TINA syndrome? There are countless psychological principles and phenomena we know little about, and yet on a ...

Although Gitta Gurke and Kalle Bohne are very good private detectives, they would welcome some help. You can assist them in solving forty different mysteries, but don't think it is going to be easy. You will have to watch very carefully for visual clues. You will be required to figure out some ...

Hanno had been looking forward to going to school, but his classmates make fun of him because he is too fat. This depresses him terribly; he doesn't do his homework or have fun playing. On his way home from school, he sits down on a park bench and begins to draw figures in the sand with a little stick.

It was Nietzsche himself who called his first publication a "bold book", a "book suitable perhaps for artists with a side inclination to analytical and retrospective capability, full of psychological innovation and artists' secrecies, with the metaphysics of an artist in the back of his mind, a ...

"I wish I had been a good mother to you."

"She would love to tell her mother that she now has a daughter. Paula suddenly feels a flash of longing for her mother although she hasn't missed her all these years."
In the waning years of the 1960s, young Paula - chomping at the bit ...

"I was five years old when I first realized that I could read minds."

Little Anton inherited the gift for reading minds from his beloved grandfather, a goose keeper who had always dreamed of being a violinist. With this gift, Anton saved his mother's life. This is the memory ...

How can you become the woman you want to be?

One mild summer's night in 1906, young, headstrong Lisette, the daughter of wealthy builder Otto Winter, secretly runs away from her parents' home and everything she previously knew as her life. Her heart belongs to fashion design and to ...

The magic of a Christmas evening

The residents of an old apartment building are looking forward to the approaching Christmas season with something less than enthusiasm. On every floor, in every apartment, chaos, conflict or loneliness rule the day. Five-yearold Jules is the only ...

The dark side of the Emerald IsleThe famous and beloved Irish environmental activist Cathal Connor is discovered brutally murdered. He had been recently seen on a talk show in which he had glibly and inventively argued for the protection of the forests south of Dublin. In her fifth case, ...

Back on Duty: Cologne's Commissioner Lena Larcher
Commissioner Lena Larcher has been dreading the approaching first-year anniversary of the car accident that robbed her of her family. In order to escape those memories and to fight her own fears, she decides to sign up for a ...

The Boysen family celebrates life
During a major celebration at Tide House - Inge Boysen is turning 80, while her granddaughter Inka is turning 18 - Fortune's Comet soars over the North Sea island. Inge, her children, and her grandchildren become Fortune's travellers. Enno is ...