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.

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!

»I like being Swiss« Dürrenmatt often said. The Switzerland he was talking about was not the nation celebrated in myths, but the juxtaposition and problematic co-existence of its four different cultures. A small nation which emerged from its conquest by Napoleon, Switzerland was for the pragmatic Swiss writer a political opportunity: a confederation of states in miniature, and as such a kind of model for Europe. As a fatherland, Switzerland often annoyed him. He made fun of the discrepancy between the small-state reality and its heroic history. But even as a very young man, Dürrenmatt was disturbed by the very fact which now irritates the whole world and a great many Swiss: the way in which Switzerland has covered up its past – its isolated role and its sparing in World War II – under a cloak of legends.

Stranded when his car breaks down in a village a traveller gladly accepts the invitation of a retired judge to spend the night in his house and to join him and a few friends for dinner and their Game. This could happen to anybody. But only Friedrich Dürrenmatt could have used such a commonplace occurrence as the starting point for the nightmarish story that follows.

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.

›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…

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.

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.

A boy dreaming of Huckleberry Finn, a mortally ill Pastor, a disillusioned Communist, a young Jewish girl running for her life - meet in a half-derelict Baltic fishing village and are drawn into a daring plan of escape from Nazi Germany. At the center of their plan is a small statue in the Pastor's church, a statue which is to be confiscated because it is politically dangerous, a statue so beautiful and powerful that it welds together the strangely assorted band of refugees. This unusual novel - unusual in both form and content - is a masterpiece of condensed dramatic writing. Andersch investigates the many needs for flight and the strange loyalties which sometimes make escape impossible.