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 ...

"We'll be able to do it with our hands tied behind our backs!" It's just as well that Ines isn't easily daunted, because if it weren't for her little sister, Christine would be feeling pretty queasy. Her friend Marleen has begged her to take over the running of her little guesthouse on a North ...

The new bestseller by Dora Heldt !

46-year old Christine is waiting for her boyfriend at the train station, full of anticipation - she's spending her holiday on her native island of Sylt. But things have already started going wrong: the woman with the red hat ...

Actually it was meant to be a relaxing working holiday: Christine (45) and Dorothea (40) were going to spend a few days on a Northsea island, helping a friend renovate her pub. But then Christine is compelled by her mother to take her father along. And they've barely set foot on the island when ...

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 ...

In two volumes, the dtv-Atlas World History offers a unique combination of maps and illustrations placed alongside a detailed chronological summary of the main cultural, scientific, religious and political events of the period.

Volume one covers the period from the beginning of world ...

This series on the philosophy of passions is a search for a free time in the truest sense of the word, when the everyday ego takes "time out" and loses itself in the passionate pursuit of sports, hobbies or tricks. The authors describe their passions subjectively, likably and self-ironically, even ...

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.

"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 ...

"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 ...

Judith S is a woman of 46. She has striking red hair that she wears loose; she lives alone and has no children. Judith is a judge - an excellent judge, soon to be promoted, but that doesn't bring her any closer to her colleagues. Her parents died several years ago. On ...

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 parents, and why she turned her back on the GDR and moved to Paris.

Berlin, Weimar, Paris: just place names and ...