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 ...

A story of human longing and failure, of German history, and the ethics of science

Against his father's will, Hermann Oberth moves to Göttingen in 1920 in order to study physics - the most exciting science of his age in the most exciting city there is. Hermann wants to turn 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: ...

An extraordinary adventure and an unforgettable hero

Bartholomew is an orphan from Bombay, he's twelve years old and speaks almost as many languages. This is why, in the year 1854, he is hired as a translator by the brothers Schlagintweit from Germany, who, with the support of ...

"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 ...

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 ...