Oslo, 1980: If that coin hadn't become stuck in the telephone cabin, she would not have been the first to find out the terrible news – and her life would have taken a different course. Berndorf in the Black Forest, 1997: Lis Kahn, now a bookseller in her early forties, continues to reflect on this turn of events. Back then, aged twenty-five, freshly in love and on the verge of completing her education, she and her brother had decided, at one stroke, to take on the mountainous debts made by their father – a publisher and former factory owner – in order to save him and the rest of the family from ruin. First and foremost, ›The Kahns‹ is a psychological novel, which examines the life of a woman who, as the daughter of an entrepreneur, has been unable to escape the demands of her father; of a woman whose parents and ancestors appear larger-than-life. In addition, the novel relates, in a wonderfully detailed and memorable manner, the story of the Kahn Industrial Co., one of Germany's oldest wood manufacturers - the »Fugger and Welser of the Black Forest.« A family company that once made its fortune in the rafting trade, had its place in world history and was as equally buffeted by successes and failures as the German economy itself. A company that managed to get itself out of the red with the invention of the beer mat, after the legendary chamber pot saucer had gone out of fashion, and that, in order to survive, produced not only telegraph poles but also barracks for the Nazi labour service - a true mirror of German history.

When, at last, the man of her dreams speaks to her, she turns him down. »As if a stranger were speaking through her lips.« Ferraghani is Persian, Sanda is German. They meet in Vienna as students. It is the beginning of a story as old as Romeo and Juliet. It is about the joys and terrors of great love, the embodiment of bliss and the crash into reality. Here, however, the relationship is not doomed to an untimely end through death of the protagonists; Sanda and Ferraghani are faced with the question of all failed lovers: Was their fate sealed from the beginning? Or is there a kind of happiness that cries out for destruction? A love story of shimmering eroticism and tender melancholy – as well as oriental inspiration, since the Oracle of the great Hafiz to which Sanda and Ferraghani turn is available to the reader in the appendix to the book.

In the small provincial town of Parisey at the foot of the Vosges Mountains, the world still appears to be in order. Surrounded by shimmering poplar groves and cool pebble lakes, its friendly inhabitants still live in a 19th century dream, and they consider legends and sagas to be far more important than politics from the city. Rue St-Sauveur is a particularly harmonious street. This is where the town's nobility lives, a number of elderly gentlemen with turbulent histories: Lorain the power station director, for example, and Gibet the mayor, Delmont the printing press proprietor and a few others. Tolerated rather than esteemed, mother and daughter Pasteur have lived out a shadowy existence in the town ever since René Pasteur lost his life under mysterious circumstances during the final days of the war. And then one day it becomes known that Mayor Gibet is to receive the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Someone breaks his silence, and two old men start an astonishing war against each other, almost a holy war, in which the insanity of the last days of the war is relived. A story, told with the poetic charm of the 19th and the urgency of the 20th century, in which a place and its inhabitants are as vividly alive as one's own next-door neighbours.

There is only one thing better than love, and that is stories about love. This is the conclusion reached by a young woman after questioning a number of lovers who are all connected with each other in one way or another. The heart's most closely guarded secrets are revealed, and seduction and our willingness to be seduced by our own dreams and longings are the focal point of the story. What is it that triggers the famous coup de foudre, or love at first sight? The narrator hears all kinds of things about the beautiful illusion. Astonishing tactics come to light which tell how men and women protect themselves from disappointment. There is the man hunter, the girl collector, and also the heroic lover who remains doggedly true to her unrequited love. There are the melancholy sufferers who swear »never again« – until the next time. With a delightful sense of humour, and in a picturesque, unusually creative language, the authoress effortlessly intersperses her text with words of wisdom and self-knowledge. This is a small kaleidoscope of love in which each and every reader can find their own personal reflection. A kind of modern Decameron which describes the different stages and ways of being in love in an atmosphere of suspended eroticism.

A radiant autumn day, mist hanging low over the lake, a railway carriage. Two women discover that they are making the same journey: Lindau–Basel–Paris. They join forces in smuggling the heavy handbag belonging to one of them through the customs. Its contents? Bars of marzipan. Mainly for her son. The two women lose sight of each other when changing trains – only to land once more in the same compartment. All at once, they start talking. Secrets are divulged which are usually only entrusted to a father confessor – or, precisely, to a stranger. What is the truth about the model son, the recipient of the marzipan? The fact of the matter is that he broke off his contact with his mother several years ago. And while one of them talks, the other discovers, suddenly, a terrible familiarity in the other's narration. Thus a place usually connected with transience and fleetingness becomes the scene of a life drama. With shrewd irony and composure, Sibylle Mulot describes the ability which is as essential to human beings as the air is to breathing: the art of self-deception.