Their methods are agile, they are proactive and present lasting and scalable solutions – top managers live in a different sphere. Up where the air is thin, and a single faux pas can mean tumbling into the abyss. But now women are finding their way into the tie-wearers’ habitat, and remote work, so beloved among employees, is making leadership appear to be all mouth and no trousers. The challenges are becoming ever more diverse. Who can still be trusted, and who can’t? The top squad is losing its grip.

Bastian Schweinsteiger, the hero of the 2014 World Cup Final in Rio, is also the hero of Martin Suter’s latest novel. The author weaves in true (and almost true) details about the life of a man who achieved everything it is possible to achieve as a footballer. Yet Schweinsteiger also knows what it’s like to fail, and he’s no stranger to the dark side of success. This is the moving story of an extraordinary career – and a touching love story.

Top management salaries – as one would expect – are an inexhaustible subject in these new and latest ›Business Class‹ Stories. And – the second erogenous zone of a manager's identity – the exorbitant yearly bonus they receive. In addition, it is a book about the risks and side effects of launching an April fool prank, and it provides helpful tricks and techniques for the rhetorically challenged executive. It is also about the most closely guarded secret of the corporate world: advertising. About humour as a management tool and – something that calls for humour in itself – the discrepancy between a company's internal and external perception as shown through thorough analysis. And about the beastly consequences of a harmless attack of lumbago. The book also presents packages of measures to get that chronically stressed private life under control once more: work/life balance, quality time and family fitness ... plus many other subjects.

While private investigator Johann Friedrich von Allmen and his assistant Carlos are still celebrating the successful recovery of the valuable Dahlia picture, Carlos’ life partner Maria Moreno disappears. Not a lovers’ tiff, as Allmen’s factotum assumes at first, but the brutal revenge of those who feel they were robbed. Maria in exchange for the Dahlia picture – that is the kidnappers’ demand. But they did not reckon with old Dalia Gutbauer. For she is unwilling to hand over the picture, and has her own ideas about what she wants to do with it. This, of course, puts Allmen, Carlos and Maria in an extremely precarious situation. They need to act fast, and they all give their best in a dramatic race against time.

A new selection from the wide range of things that make our everyday business life so trying: petty and less petty intrigues, survival on the directors' floor, the over-conformism of those who have not quite made it to the top, weak power constellations and the timing necessary for loyalty swings.

Perhaps you are already a ›dead man walking‹, but you just don't know it yet? Or a capacity that has become overcapacity, ballast that is about to be thrown overboard? And what is the most elegant way for a boss to part ways with a ›cost centre‹? By financing, if possible, his or her own pay rise? The backdrop for each volume of Suter's Business Class stories is the daily reality of the business world, a world that has grown harsher with every passing year. Dismissals are simply part of the daily agenda, while the pressure of competition has become the stuff our nightmares are made of. All the more reason to resort to the only known panacea: put your feet up, relax and have a laugh – ›among friends‹!

There are people who cannot get rid of the feeling that they are always slightly behind the latest trend. Others do not even know what has been wrong with their lifestyle up till now. Both groups are ideal candidates for How to Live Properly with Geri Weibel. After trying out more or less everything that can possibly be tried out, Geri has developed into a kind of »trend seismographer« in terms of contemporary lifestyle. From A for Alcohol, C for Cult, F for Fitness, L for Loft, P for Personality and S for Scene – Geri has been through and thought about them all.

Jonas Brand has no idea about the adventure that awaits him, when the intercity train comes to an abrupt halt. The train is unable to continue because of a dead body on the tracks. Brand immediately shoulders his camera, records the nightmarish events and interviews his fellow passengers. He is a freelance journalist, but one who dreams of bigger things. He wants to make films, and his project ›Montecristo‹, a story of betrayal, deception and late revenge, has blockbuster potential – if only someone would give him a chance. When he falls in love with Marina Ruiz, who charms him into revealing his dream, the project steps back into his focus. Just three months later, fate deals him another bizarre card: two onehundred Swiss Franc notes with identical serial numbers – both of which, as the bank confirms with amazement, are genuine. Then Brand’s apartment is ransacked and he gets beaten up and robbed in broad daylight. Someone clearly wants to throw him off the track that he is just about to embark on.

This compilation of further stories from the ›business class‹ looks at the self-servicing mentality of top management. At the enormous efforts made to take a real break, for once. At autistic decision-makers and their polar opposite – bosses who would genuinely like to be modern, but are constantly held back by their staff. At people's willingness to feel sexually harassed. At managers sitting in the lotus position. And, time and again, at the infinitesimal gradations on the career scale and those seemingly trivial yet highly symbolic gestures that influence one's chances of promotion or demotion upon it.

Even the floor of these boozy, merry events is slippery, the businessman never celebrating quite casually. Because a career knows no downtime. Suter’s ›Business Class‹ column – still absolutely topical to this day! Mixing work and alcohol often involves skating on thin ice. Be it a company celebration, a business lunch, a corporate event, a Christmas meal, New Year’s Eve at the boss’s place, a glass of wine with the new secretary or after-work pints with the lads – managers can never quite relax because there is no downtime on the career ladder. That means their greatest threat is not a heart attack or alcohol, but their own species. The ideal guideline not only for stressed businessmen, but for anyone who has the misfortune of dealing with them: secretaries, subordinates, wives, children . . . After reading this, they will see their businessman through new eyes.

The hierarchy is well-known: the unreachable exalted tycoons at the top of the pyramid, the harassed executives in-between, and the burnt-out workaholics further down the line. The everyday rituals of power politics: the pecking order and the struggle for the acquisition of status symbols, ingratiation and intrigues, and self-perpetuating frustration - even in the domestic bedroom. As a former advertising professional and long-standing president of the Art Directors' Club, Martin Suter knows the milieu he describes like the back of his hand. His ›Business Class‹ stories with their keen, subtle observations are not only brilliantly written satires, they also read like a manual for executives: the stress factor - for whom is it a must, for whom a taboo? The furnishings of the director's office as a manifestation of a lust for power; the ritual of greeting, and what you can do wrong; a housewife trained in the art of hosting as a possibly crucial weapon in the fight against rivals. And lots more.

Is it crazy to think that you can ›turn back‹ time? Peter Taler certainly thinks so when he first gets wind of what Knupp, the old man who lives opposite him, is planning. Because he wants to make the seemingly impossible, possible. The first thing Taler notices is that strange things are happening in the house opposite, where eighty-year-old Knupp lives. He starts to spy on him and record the goings-on with his camera, but by the time he realises he is being spied on too, he is already tangled up in the events on the other side of the street. Old Knupp, who lost his wife twenty years ago, is convinced that descending like Orpheus into the realm of the dead is not the only way to find your way back to a loved one. And he is not alone in his convictions, sharing this theory with famous minds such as Einstein and Aristoteles. But putting it into practise is not that easy. In fact, it is practically impossible. But this is where Taler comes in.

A fascinating novel about a man in a life's crisis. A psychothriller about a male friendship. An exciting crime story against the background of a highly topical chapter of our everyday lives.

Star business lawyer Urs Blank, forty-five years old, specialist for merger negotiations, has his feelings under control. He has learned not to leave himself wide open, but to make use of the openness of others. But then his life runs off the rails. A trip with hallucinogenic mushrooms leads to a dangerous change of personality, from which no-one succeeds in saving him. Blank flees into the forest. Until he finally comes to understand: there is only one way to free himself from this nightmare.

David loves Marie. But Marie is not overly interested in the waiter shambling helplessly around her. Then David makes a discovery. In the drawer of an old bedside table, he finds a manuscript. The novel appears to date from the Fifties, and tells of a love, deep and pure, the likes of which are practically unknown in the cynical, post-modern twenty-first century. Marie is enthralled by the novel and, believing David to be its author, offers the manuscript to a publishing house without his knowledge. Lila, Lila becomes a bestseller – and Marie David's lover. He would like nothing more than to tell her the truth, but: Her love had been built on a slight deception, the removal of which would have swept away that love's very fundament. This is an outcome that David intends to avoid at any cost. Meanwhile, what began as a tiny lie begins to snowball into an ever greater disaster. Love, betrayal and death – such are the themes of the bestseller, which begins to control David's life in a way that he would never have imagined possible.