Five novellas that play out in the south west of Berlin, and through which the Teltow Canal winds its way like a red thread, with its black crows, secluded villas and impenetrable forests. Above it, the sky is suddenly sealed off by an ash cloud. After his wife's unexpected death, a man gives up everything that connects him to the past. But what can he cling to now? – An established politician suddenly becomes convinced that a crow is sitting on the back seat of his car like a crouching shadow. – A journalist is summoned to cold and damp London for a job and hopes his wife will follow him. But when an Icelandic volcano seals off the skies with its ash cloud, his imagination runs wild. – A man follows mysterious sounds of cello music in the woods and finds a famous cellist, but unfortunately she has already been dead for twenty-five years. – The fifth novella is about a hotel consultant, married and more and more away on business. Why can his wife, who loves him, only keep him with her as a shadow?

A love story that begins at a sickbed: in January 1937, the Austrian Karl Sequens is admitted to hospital in Valencia as part of a transport of wounded volunteers. When he and Herminia Roudière Perpiñá meet it is love at first sight for them both. They get married without delay as if they knew there was not much time left to them. One year later their daughter Rosa María is born, shortly before the defeat of the Spanish republic they lose touch. Herminia flees with the child, first to France and subsequently to Vienna where Karl's sister receives her with bad grace and finally has her evacuated to Bavaria. Herminia hasn't heard from her husband for years when three letters arrive: from Dachau, Lublin and Auschwitz. The study of Love at First Sight paces our era and continent, tying up hope and sorrow, yearning for justice and for happiness. First of all it is the persisting plea for a love into death; an affection that is living on in their daughter and leading in a new love – at a sickbed again. A radical, deeply moving love story, told in a fascinatingly clear and vivid language, shamingly uncontemporary!

On the way home, a fifteen-year-old boy called Michael Berg gets into difficulties. A woman in her mid-thirties helps him out. Some time later, the boy takes her a bunch of flowers as a way of saying thank you. He visits her again. Hanna is the first woman he has ever desired, and a secret love begins. But there is something dark and mysterious about Hanna, and she reacts irritably to his questions about who she is. One day she disappears. She vanishes from Michael's life, but not from his thoughts. As a student of law he encounters Hanna again in court. The young man gets a shock when he realises he has loved a criminal. He can see no rhyme nor reason in the way Hanna behaves during the trial. That is, until the scales fall from his eyes. For Hanna is not only guilty of a cruel crime, she also has a desperately well-protected secret. The past is unveiled – Michael's past love, and the past of Germany. Michael realises that he cannot escape from either of them. A woman who is difficult to understand or accept, either for Michael or the reader. And the dilemma of a generation.

Mr. Selb - private detective and former prosecutor rolled into one - is hurtling toward a head-on collision with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is investigating machinations some people would rather conceal. Those involved in the coverups? In the ›Selbian‹ case, American military men and the German machinery of justice.

With his first work ›Viehjud Levi‹, Thomas Strittmatter was discovered for the world of theatre in 1983. It was presented at the Mühlheim Theatre Festival, at the Berlin Theatre Meeting and the Vienna Festival. The plays by Thomas Strittmatter continue the tradition of Horvath, of Fleisser – they are folk plays in the best sense of the word, clearly disassociating themselves from West End plays, from the »folksy« theatre.

Driven out of his home, our hero wanders helplessly through the streets, ends up at the railway station, gets into a train going to Basel, his home town – and finds himself back in the past, in his youth. Nothing has changed at his parent's home – even the soda siphon by the side of his father's bottles of spirits. But his parents do not recognise the stranger who arrived on their doorstep, and they miss their small son. A journey in time through several screens begins.

This is the story of Raab, a boy dogged by misfortune and the darkness around him, hence dubbed Raabe (Raven). Having casually lost his father somewhere along the line, it has never really sunk into him that his father is actually dead. Raabe is sent to boarding school. There he meets the offspring of the nouveauriche Liebherr hotel dynasty, who soon becomes known as Fieber (Fever) after having faked high temperature and being caught. Another classmate, Andrea, has rejected the feminine connotation of the 'a'- ending in her first name because she does not want to be a girl. Then there is Taubman (Deafman) whose handicap prevents him from being taken seriously. Raabe is fascinated by Deafman's sensitivity and so the two share a silent friendship. The Stonemason and the Pharmacist (Raabe's grand-uncle) are also two taciturn friends in our tale. After boarding school Raabe first does an apprenticeship with his grand-uncle, then with the Stonemason, where he works like a dog. The Stonemason dies - twice. Whereupon Raabe - a distant relative of Voltaire's Candide - in an attempt at liberation leaves the countryside and settles into the wild city.

The gripping story of a young gypsy girl born in the year the Nazis came to power in Germany. Adopted by a loving working-class family, Sidonia grows up as a nurtured and protected child in a small, impoverished Austrian town. The times are turbulent and saturated with fear and violence. Everything foreign is perceived as dangerous, and general insecurity turns into hatred. Sidonia looks different than the other children in town, she cannot hide her heritage. As the Nazis gain influence and power, danger mounts for her and her socialist foster parents. They are exposed to increasing pressure until ultimately their very lives are threatened and Sidonia's fate lies in the hands of the townspeople. As a mercilessly sober chronicler of facts, Hackl presents us with historical events that were long suppresssed. Yet beyond the actual individual case the clear intensity of his language evokes the fate of all those who are persecuted for their ethnic origin, political beliefs, or religious background. In the end, no reader can escape the haunting question who has to bear responsibility for injustice that was committed and that still is committed today.

›Aurora's Motive‹ ist an electrifying novel of feminism gone mad, based on the true story of Aurora Rodriguez. Born in 1890 into the stifling world of provincial bourgeois Spain, Aurora Rodriguez grew up precocious, virtually self-educated, filled with longings for self-realization and cloudy Nietzschean dreams (gleaned from her father's library) of a world made better by a Superwoman – if not herself, than a daughter. In 1914, after her parents died, she moved to Madrid and gave birth to a daughter, Hildegart, whom she proceeded to raise by herself, with utter devotion and according to her own theories, to be the Valkyrie of the New Era. Hildegart was indeed a prodigy – a thirteen-year-old law student at Madrid's Central University, a brilliant socialist activist who led campaigns for sexual freedom and the creation of the Spanish Republic - until, at the age of 17, she fell under the spell of the notoriously seductive H.G. Wells, who invited her to leave Spain. Torn between the superwoman persona her mother had created for her and her own, more worldly desires, Hildegart begged Aurora to rescue her. And so Aurora did…

In five months' time the guard of a Parisian bank who has come to understand that the only purpose of his job is to open the door of the director's car, will finally have fully paid off his little garret thus marking the completion of yet another chapter of his life plan. But this fatalistic course of events is abruptly called into question by a pigeon which unexpectedly appears on a hot Friday morning in August 1984.

A very young woman meets Kamp who gave up all hope in life a long time ago. Kamp is unemployed and, in accordance with the law, he will soon have early retirement status. Kamp cannot understand why Claudia should keep visiting him. He suspects that an evil, criminal plan is at the bottom of it all, and when Claudia goes into hiding once again, he sees that as proof of his suspicions. Kamp decides to bury his foolish hopes once and for all and instead to prepare for death. But Claudia comes back and the story of this unusual, even impossible relationship takes a turn very different from what Kamp expected.

Perfume is a long-lasting international success story: Originally published in 1985 and translated into over 50 languages, the book has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In Germany, the book spent 9 years on the Spiegel bestseller list. The movie adaptation of 2006 was one of the 15 most successful in German cinema history, with 5.6 million box office viewers in Germany alone.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in eighteenth-century Paris and abandoned on the streets, discovers that he has an extraordinary – almost superhuman – sense of smell, he inherited from his mother. As he sniffs his way across France, this gift is exploited by Grenouille to create the world’s most marvellous perfumes. Yet in seeking perfection in his experiments, he realises that a vital ingredient is missing for the perfect scent: innocence. In order to get the ingredient he needs, he must capture it – whatever the cost.

In 1955 Dr Isaak Kohler, a distinguished Zurich councilman, walks into a restaurant full of well-known politicians, businessmen and artists, and shoots a university professor in open view. For his crime, Kohler is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Dr Kohler, happy as a lark and infectiously content behind bars, sends for Spat, a young, down-on-his-luck lawyer and asks him to reinvestigate his case on the supposition that he is innocent. Spat does the seemingly impossible - he manages to have the murderer acquitted - and in the process is driven to madness. The lawyer becomes obsessed with his intellectual enterprise and, seduced by the notion of justice, decides to murder the murderer. ›The Execution of Justice‹ is a brilliant allegorical thriller that dramatises the distinction between justice and the law.

An eighth grade Latin lesson at a Gymnasium in the late 1920s: What begins as an ordinary class for student Franz Kien takes a sudden turn when headmaster Himmler enters the classroom, turning the lesson into a humiliating ordeal for Franz. In this chillingly topical text, Andersch shows how the darkest chapter of German history began to unfold in classrooms.

With a startling sense of immediacy, this tense and gripping novel whirls the reader into the vortex of up-to-date life in cosmopolitan Europe. It is a tale of personal flight. Franziska, a beautiful German woman, impulsively escapes from an unpleasant marriage and takes a train to Venice. There, in the bleak wintertime atmosphere of this fabulous city, she is unwittingly drawn into the cross-currents of a dangerous struggle whose source lies in the turbulence of war and international intrigue … Suspense, murder, and unexpected fulfillment mark the climax of this powerful and compelling story. In skillfully unfolding the fates of his characters caught in the complexities of their age, Alfred Andersch eloquently records a pattern of life in Europe today.