Donna Leon has led an adventurous life, and with her tell-tale knack for observation, she turns her experiences in America, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Italy (of course) and Switzerland into a captivating read. She takes us on a journey around the world, from growing up on a farm, to curfew pajama parties in Iran, financial straits, and a Fiat 600. And we join Donna as she arrives in Italy as a chaperone, as she hunts for the perfect cappuccino, and as she encounters small marvels in the mountains.

»There is no worse crime than not having loved.«
Donna Leon

»In the hands of great authors, characters are like real people, merely realer«, Donna Leon once said. Perhaps this is why her life is so rich in characters and people accompanying her, both real and fictional.

Backstage presents a colorful troupe: the rock genius Frank Zappa, Veniceʼs most famous diamond dealer, a courageous sex worker and womenʼs rights activist, a clever composer, tragic heroes and admired colleagues. In the hands of Donna Leon, these encounters turn into sparkling jewels. A treasure trove of delightful discoveries.

»But what do we really gain by calling him the enfant terrible of Protestantism, a strange saint, the St Augustine of the north and the Christian thinker per se in an apostate age? All these characterisations are all right in their way, but they are not sufficient to reach the heart of what can be learned from him. Kierkegaard's descriptions are true visions of the spiritual need of today's human being in his fear and despair. Kierkegaard proclaims knowledge of the abysses of human existence that stir the spiritual depths of the modern reader who has become clairvoyant.«

Balzac (born 1799 in Tours, died 1850 in Paris) was an incorrigible optimist. But his hope of marrying into money was repeatedly shattered, until he was finally able to marry the Polish Countess Eveline Hanska shortly before his death. Balzac was renowned, and notorious, for his »on credit« lifestyle: mahogany furniture, oriental carpets, rare walking sticks, lemon kid gloves and a back exit to escape from his creditors. Legendary too was his passion for his work – garbed in a monk's habit and kept awake by black coffee, he created the most immense fictional work of all time, ›La Comédie Humaine‹, an entire universe of 1300 characters and their stories. Johannes Willms reveals Balzac's life before the reader's astonished eyes. He bases his biography on the most personal of documents, Balzac's letters, but differentiates between the shimmering veneer (that Balzac cultivated and lived) and the often more dramatic reality.

Magnificent and infuriating, loving and stifling, self-sacrificing yet interfering – Michel Bergmann loves his mother Charlotte, and sometimes he can’t stand her. In this unvarnished book, he tells the story of a strong, obstinate woman who was driven out of Germany, lost nearly her entire family, and was ultimately happily reunited with her future husband, yet too often had to face her troubles alone.

Auschwitz, 1941. After one prisoner has managed to escape, ten randomly chosen inmates are sentenced to death by starvation in the ›Hungerbunker‹. A man then steps forward and asks the camp commandant to exchange him for one of the doomed inmates. Who is this man? And what induces him to give his life for a man he doesn't even know? This man is Polish Franciscan monk Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941). With his life marred by tuberculosis from young adulthood, he established, against many odds, a Catholic magazine with a circulation of millions of copies and founded Europe's largest monastery, Niepokalanów. There he gave refuge to Jews and other victims of persecution under the Nazi occupation and as a result ended up in the dungeons of the Gestapo and the camp hell of Auschwitz. In his novel ›The Hour of the Pelican‹, Walter Heinrich traces the life and death of Maximilian Kolbe. With great empathy – and his life-affirming esprit which again and again manifests itself in the book – he narrates the life of a man who stands by his belief and his ideals, to the last extremity.

Harald Naegeli, an individual filled with poetry, an artist filled with love for nature, and an advocate for utopia and the museum on the street. This unique biography tells of the life and work of the introverted artist, who completed his ›Urwolken (Primeval Clouds)‹ in large format over the years with single strokes, as well as the extroverted sprayer and political Dadaist who can adorn building walls within seconds — just don’t mention the term ›criminal damage‹.

»Often described as prime father of street art, he sees himself as a direct successor of painting cavemen.«
Urs Bühler/ NZZ, Zurich

For a man who said of himself that he suffered from a disease called autobiographobia, this chronicle represents the ideal biography. A documentation of his life and works, constructed with the utmost precision and succinctness. The appendix includes an epilogue, the table of contents of Chekhov's first Russian annotated edition and a complete bibliography of German translations.

In interviews with Felizitas von Schönborn, renowned Austrian artist Paul Flora fully recounts for the first time, with his worldly scepticism and casual pessimism, the remarkable, amusing and profound events that have taken place on his extraordinary path through life.

This unusual Swiss artist’s biography is marking the 100th anniversary of Rainer Brambach’s birth. It is not only knowledgably researched but also entertainingly presented and featuring a picture section. At his death in 1983, the poet Rainer Brambach left behind some 140 poems and two dozen short stories – not a large body of work, but an outstanding, very distinct and refreshingly unacademic one. Deported from Switzerland, deserted from the Reich Labour Service and eventually arrested in Switzerland, the former painter, decorator and later gardener was an exceptional phenomenon in the country’s post-war literary scene. He reached his creative apex in the 1950s and 60s, when his poems appeared regularly in the prestigious literary journal Akzente – alongside the work of Enzensberger, Bachmann, Celan, Canetti and other great names of the era. Brambach was also a very close friend to his mentor, the poet Gunter Eich, his wife Ilse Aichinger and the writer and publisher Hans Bender. Franziska Schurch and Isabel Koellreuter have sifted through memories of colleagues and fellow travellers, archives and Rainer Brambach’s literary output. The result is a multi-layered and fascinating biography of an eloquent Swiss poet’s unusual life.

Children sometimes imagine themselves waking up one day to find that they are all alone. The school is closed, their parents have disappeared, the world is empty and everyone – apart from themselves - has been wiped out. For Marianne Gilbert, 8 years old when the novel begins, this childish nightmare comes true in 1939. With her Jewish origins, she has been excluded from school. Her mother Elke, an up-and-coming singer from a strictly Lutheran family, whose marriage little Marianne cannot patch up, often leaves the child alone in a never-ending string of apartments in Berlin and Paris. Her Jewish father, Robert Gilbert, since the 1920s recognised as the lyricist and arranger of popular songs and musical films (such as Once in a Lifetime, Three Good Friends and The White Horse Inn), has an affair and is then forced to flee abroad – a private catastrophe in the midst of a political one. Elke does not want to give Robert up and, with the help of their little daughter – who, as a »mischling«, is in as much danger as her father – she catches up with him and ships the »family« off to New York. The Gilberts may have been saved, but are ill prepared for life in the new world. From their tiny apartment in the Bronx, surrounded by other German-Jewish refugees (like Hannah Ahrendt and Heinrich Blücher), they plan to continue on Broadway the success they had enjoyed in Berlin. But to be successful in America, they must first learn how to assimilate. How to become an American when, although one may be intellectually brilliant, one cannot express one's complex ideas in English? Marianne, the lonely only child, shows them how it's done…

»First we dream of the future, then we live it, and in the end, once this lived future is in the past, we recount it to ourselves.«

This autobiography is special: it stops where others usually begin. Urs Widmer's years as a child, as a young man, as a student, as an editor. His family home, friends, his first loves, his wife May. Family history and family myths. School, teachers. Holidays, travel. Basel, Montpellier, Greece, Paris. The banal and the dramatic at a time when history was being written: World War II, the Cold War, the sixties. And, again and again, his parents, the ever-present shadows in his work. Even though these memories often deal with the tragic, their vitality and vividness are unsurpassable.

Today, Rembrandt's significance is unquestioned, he is accepted as one of the great masters. Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Rembrandt, once said: »You cannot sincerely love Rembrandt without knowing that God exists.« The theologian Walter Nigg is overwhelmed by Rembrandt's art - and with good reason. No other painter has understood the Bible so thoroughly nor interpreted it so timelessly in paintings and drawings. Nigg's biography shows impressively how much his art was connected to his belief and to his doubts.

Another genre in which Fauser revolutionized everything that went before.

With an afterword by German writer and DJ Franz Dobler.

»I always saw Brando as a rebel – a naive way of looking at it, for sure; what is a rebel anyway? In a world crawling with revolutionaries, the rebel is a man of the past, a conservative. That may be. For so many people of today, the earth seems like a thing of the past, and like Brando, when in doubt I’ll stick with the earth.«

Fauser and Brando – two ruptured souls united by more than just their ability to getting back up when knocked down.

»This is a book about the shadow between idea and reality.«
Jörg Fauser

A true humanist, his thematic roots reached back to Antiquity, his speculative scientific and philosophical mind many decades into the future. The book gives a portrait of the young artist coming into his own, when he is propulsed into fame by his very first comedy (It Is Written) just after World War II.

Ulrich Weber tells the story of Dürrenmatt’s life (including his love of astronomy, physics, painting, football and dogs), the genesis of his works and of the cosmic mind, whose probing questions accompany us well into the 21st century.