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 suspenseful tale of a police inspector's unremitting search for a psychopathic killer his superiors claim does not exist. But more than a novel of crime and detection, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's deeply moving drama is the eloquent account of a decent man's gradual decay. With grim irony, the master storyteller shows how a dedicated law-enforcer's obsession for truth and justice can lead him to bait a trap as morally offensive as the evil strategy used by the maniacal murderer he relentlessly pursues.

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.

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.

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.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

Heinz Ludwig Arnold, the journalist and editor from Göttingen who met Dürrenmatt in 1975, was probably more closely involved in the author's late work as a critic, part-time editor, and friend than anyone else. Arnold's collected essays and lectures, written with the most intimate knowledge of Dürrenmatt's writing, are among the best and most vivid texts ever written about Dürrenmatt, and particularly about the way his late work came into being. Heinz Ludwig Arnold is the editor of Dürrenmatt's Conversations 1961–1990, published by Diogenes in 1996.

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.

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.

Normally the double-basses are assimilated, concealed in the orchestra. Scored both as a social comedy and a lament to the essential unfairness of life, ›The Double Bass‹ restores a grain of justice to a too long-ignored area of artistic endeavour, allowing one double-bass player at least to perform in this book.

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!

›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…