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 ...

One of the most scandalous love stories of history: a renegade monk marries a run-away nun, and in the process our understanding of love between man and woman takes on a historically new meaning. So too the love between God and people, and with it our very understanding of religion. This is the ...

In his cleverly constructed debut thriller Arno Strobel takes us back to the time immediately after the events of 1945. While bombed-out Europe is being rebuilt, a few incorrigible Germans are devising an insane plan. Following their charismatic leader "Magus", the Simonian brotherhood ...

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 ...

Kant and Nietzsche - everyone knows that they are two famous German philosophers. Some may perhaps remember Kant in connection with 'Enlightenment' or know that Nietzsche was insane at the end of his life, having propagated the super-human.

However, few people have read Kant or ...

Fletcher, the cleverest and coolest striped skunk in town by a long shot, has made his home in the back yard of the Wild Elk Restaurant-where he also enjoys many an alfresco dining experience - until the day Bode, the head chef and owner of the establishment, cottons on. As a result of this bad ...

In only a few days' time the international school will play host to almost 1,000 participants from a total of ten different schools for the mini-Olympics! And it goes without saying that the five friends are training more intensively than ever before. But even on the first day strange things ...

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.

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 ...

"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 ...

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 ...