Los Angeles, 1959. The aging filmmaker Curtis Melnitz is tormented by nightmares. He is in dire need of sleeping pills – but can only get them if he regularly visits the psychoanalyst. On the analyst’s couch, he reluctantly recounts the story of his life, from Hollywood to Berlin, from the black-and-white, silent dream factory to the garish and glaring German reality of the early 20th century. A chapter for every appointment on the couch. A life like a novel.

A copywriter loses everything in one go: love, money, and his career. But with the help of artificial intelligence, he manages to get back on his feet. The latest technology helps him write a book that generates considerable attention, because it supposedly tells the ›story of a genuine fate‹. Only one woman knows this isn’t true: the former lover of the now-celebrated author, who once took everything from him.

A smart, engaging mind game about authorship in the age of AI, and a gripping read on a highly topical theme.

A man stands on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and destroys a star with a pickaxe. Why did he do it? The affair leads back to the winter of 1944: under the pretext of shooting a propaganda film, a Berlin film team sets off into the Alps. But in the village of Kastelau, the filming of an invented story increasingly becomes the invented story of a filming.

At the dingy Palace Hotel, a shady businessman visits an aging prostitute night after night, coming to hear her tell stories – it seems she has a flair for the inscrutable, not merely in life but in the fabricated world of her invention. For eleven nights, this modern Scheherazade concocts the wildest fairy tales and parables in order to satisfy her final customer, who likes to be called king.

1871. Cattle-dealer Solomon Meijer has made a reputation for himself in Endingen, a rare Swiss town in which Jews are allowed to reside. He leads a largely untroubled life, but this is set to end when he answers a knock at the door in the middle of the night. On the doorstep stands his young distant cousin, Janki, half-dead and begging for refuge. The pitiful figure is invited in and given a coveted place in the bosom of the family, but when Janki recovers and regains his ambition and his fine looks, he will change the Meijer family's lives for generations to come . . .

Goethe returns from Switzerland to find himself back home in Weimar, suffering from writer’s block. It doesn’t matter how quiet his young son August is, or how lovingly his wife Christiane looks after him. Ultimately, it’s his brother-in-law, Christian August Vulpius – also a writer, much despised by Goethe as a hack – who proves an unlikely source of aid. Aid that Goethe does not want yet desperately needs.

After a sumptuous Christmas dinner, the Pope receives a visit from the Devil, who whisks him off in a red Ferrari and advises him to restore the Church’s ailing finances using sponsorships. Was it a dream? Possibly. But next morning, the world looks different somehow. God, too, decides to pay the Earth a visit when he realises humanity is busy demolishing his creation. Can he save the day? Well, he’ll give it a shot.

Sebi, our teenage hero and narrator in Charles Lewinsky’s epos, is not exactly tailored to the rough medieval world he’s born into: gifted with youthful wisdom, he is more of a storyteller than a warhorse. With these qualities, he hardly meets the demands in the rural Swiss village in 1313. However from Halfbeard, a stranger from a distant region, the boy discovers both the good and the bad in humanity – and does come into his own as he dedicates himself to the power of narration: the truth is in the telling.

A book about the power of language, both philosophical and playful – by the acclaimed author of the international bestselling novel Melnitz.

Being a stutterer, Johannes Hosea Stärckle trusts entirely in the power of the written word and uses it ruthlessly, in self-defence and for his career. A fraud case – he calls it a writerly carelessness – puts him in prison. Using letters, avowals and invented stories, he tries to win over the people who have a say over his life behind bars: the prison chaplain, the drugs boss, his publisher.

Andersen, once a brutal torturer, is reborn in another century. However, his evil nature has not disappeared; it is now simply trapped in the cute form of an infant – and is therefore all the more terrifying. Andersen is given a new chance with his new life. But he does not use it to atone for his crimes. On the contrary.

Cousins Tom and Mike Keita have both arrived in Switzerland from the same African village. Only, Tom is a successful footballer – and Mike is an illegal immigrant. The treatment they receive is very different. While one is fast-tracked to citizenship, the other is sucked into a bureaucratic mill that has only one goal: to spit him back out again as quickly as possible.