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 ...

Nicki and Canon are meant for each other. So when Canon disappears, Nicki sets off on a quest to find him - and uncovers a dark secret in his life that leads her into totally alien territory. Running parallel to familiar reality there exists a world of flowing creatures: creatures that ...

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.

Our past and our future are buried beneath the ice.

The ice-cap in the Arctic and Antarctic has always played a crucial role in the earth's complex eco-system. So this 740,000-year old ice contains valuable information about the climatic changes which took place in the ...

A girl named Johnny

Early on, Joana Wolkenzin knows that she is different. She spends hours reading and learns song lyrics by heart. As she grows older, she falls in love with both boys and girls. In the No Man's Land of Western Pomerania in the 1990s, she gives herself a new name: ...

Lorenz, a former librarian and cinema usher, is now pushing 30 and working in a copy shop. One day he holds onto one of several copies of a diary he is binding for a diplomat. He gives it unread to his girlfriend Iris, a substitute teacher, so they can read it together. The diary is the ...

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 fled Bresekow many years ago. Her visit brings about many changes in the village, raising questions old and new, ...

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. And it's the moving and tragic love story of Julius and Jadwiga, and Julius's only seemingly ...

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 ...