Born in Ireland and living in Zurich, Mary is a beanpole with translucent skin, some freckles, blue eyes and blond hair. She has two admirers in Zurich: a writer and first-person narrator and his friend Helmut, letter writer and author as well. Yet she ends up with a service station attendant in distant Australia. It is here that she receives Helmut's ›Love Letter to Mary‹.

›Vor uns die Sintflut‹ contains twenty-one ironical and enigmatic stories, modern fairy-tales and unobtrusive parables. At the approaching leap into the next millenium, Urs Widmer provides us with an urgent reminder that the world was once beautiful. The threshold of the second millenium is imminent, and the world is coming apart at the seams. Apocalyptic terror engenders strange fancies. Urs Widmer throws light on some contemporary phenomena: »Noah's Cult«, for example, which is enjoying increasing popularity and inspiring quite a few people to cultivate their own arks in the secrecy of their cellars. But the enemy's threat is not only water: extra-terrestrials experiment with our genes, and the hole in the ozone layer demands absurd survival strategies. And the computers have our future well under control. Man seems to be completely occupied with fleeing from himself, hunted, a refugee, a bizarre tourist or the inhabitant of an artificial paradise. The future? No time even for despair, but only Olympic laughter in the face of the gigantic stupidity of the human race? Orpheus, now speechless, begs for a few last francs in the guise of a confused old tramp…

Kuno, a male nurse in an old people's home, has a new inmate: his father. In the isolation of the home, they finally start talking. Kuno had always regarded his father as boring, a man without a history and without a destiny – until one day he realises that he had once risked his life in the war. His ageing father had a destiny, and what a destiny! This realisation changes Kuno's life, and he embarks on a journey into his own psyche which takes him to the depths of the Congo. Longings awaken and dreams come true – rays of light in the darkness, meetings with kings, seductive women and the songs of the jungle: the alluring faraway places which he once regarded as the heart of darkness become an adventurous, exciting scene of lunacy, wildness and a test of his own inner strength.

On his twelfth birthday Karl receives a book of blank pages, which he proceeds to fill, day by day, throughout his life. But after his death the book disappears before his son, as tradition dictates, has had the chance to read it. So the son, as first-person narrator, retells the story: My Father's Book. This is the record of a rich existence, characterised by its love for life and passion for books. The fathers ability to inspire both himself and others is perhaps his most wonderful trait. Inwardly he lives in the world of Villon, Diderot and Stendhal whose work, along with that of many others, he translates while outwardly he feels himself drawn to of a group of young artists, all with distinct styles, but united in their burning antifascist beliefs. It comes as no surprise that he too, during a legendary carnival in 1936, becomes a communist. On his death in 1965, however, this allegiance is but a distant memory. My Father's Book is, inter alia, the story of the political aspirations and disappointments of the twentieth century. Of course, the book also tells the story of Clara, the woman he loves, the central figure in the novel My Mother's Lover. The same story, recounted from a startlingly new perspective.

In the novella ›The Paradie of Oblivion‹, Widmer is trying to square the circle: for how do you write a story that is about fading and disappearing memory? Indeed, although without memory no story can be told, the novella ambivalently (for the loss of our memory could well be a curse) seems to praise the fading of memory. Thus he who is devoid of memory is no longer haunted by the dreadful images of his past.

Urs Widmer became truly famous with his later works: The Blue Siphon, My Mother’s Lover and My Father’s Book continue to enthral readers today. But like with an iceberg, beneath the surface of the contemporary witness Urs Widmer lies a great deal more, just waiting to be discovered. His early stories are the best place to start: they reveal an anarchic joy in shaking the foundations of literature.

A journey of discovery into Widmer’s early work: wild, rousing and brilliant.

An anticipated farewell. Fears already lived through. The great obsession of humanity who cannot bring it under control even with rites and age-old myths. A life towards death, told with heart warming cheerfulness. It is Friday, 22 May 2032. One day after his ninety-fourth birthday, a man sits in a lush blooming garden – it is the paradise garden of his childhood – with a recorder beside him, and tapes his story with Mr. Adamson. He tells his story to us, but most of all to Annie, his grand daughter. And he is waiting – for the very same Mr. Adamson whom he hasn't seen since he was eight years old. It was a strange encounter. A glimpse into areas which are usually concealed from the living. A grandiose book whose vitality and love of life manages to banish what is the scandal of every life: death.

»First we dream of the future, then we live it, and in the end, once this lived future is in the past, we recount it to ourselves.«

This autobiography is special: it stops where others usually begin. Urs Widmer's years as a child, as a young man, as a student, as an editor. His family home, friends, his first loves, his wife May. Family history and family myths. School, teachers. Holidays, travel. Basel, Montpellier, Greece, Paris. The banal and the dramatic at a time when history was being written: World War II, the Cold War, the sixties. And, again and again, his parents, the ever-present shadows in his work. Even though these memories often deal with the tragic, their vitality and vividness are unsurpassable.

›Chinese Whispers‹ is the name of a children's game, played here with a literary text: It travels around the world and through six languages, and is compared with its original message at the end, with astonishing results. Ten prose pieces: A dream journey that is so suggestive you feel like you are there. A game played with creation myths. A first person narrator who voices the monstrous. An internal monologue between a man as his young and old self about the state of the world and his own personal stories. Legendary tales about gossipy old aunts and places where the author has been or wants to go to. About a century full of mortal agony. About encounters of longing at inopportune moments. And a book of nightmares about what people do to one another. Prose texts, poèmes en prose, poetic, mad, funny, dark, obsessive, yet always told with effortless ease by the inimitable voice of Urs Widmer.

When she meets him, in the town by the lake in the 1920s, she is young, beautiful and rich, while he – though also young – is penniless, with only one thought in his head: music. New music. His great dream is to find an orchestra to play Bartók, Krenek and Prokofiev – all the young, unknown composers. At the end of her life, he is a famous conductor and the richest man in the country, and she is poor and still driven by her unceasing love for him – which neither he nor anyone else knows about. ›My Mother's Lover‹ is the story of a woman's dumb, obsessive passion, described by her son. It is the narration of a lifelong tragedy written from a reserved distance which almost transforms pain into serenity.

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.

The hero of this book, and even its narrator, is a dwarf. A small, rubber dwarf of the sort that can be bought in any toy shop. But this dwarf has a secret: when nobody is looking, he comes to life. He can move, think, feel. He accompanies Uti, the boy whose loving gaze originally brought him to life, on his journey through life, living his own dwarf existence as the boy grows through manhood almost to old age. Some readers may recognize the house from the ›Blue Siphon‹, ›My Mother's Lover‹ and ›My Father's Book‹. The same father, the same mother – this time seen from the perspective of a dwarf. It is a mistake (that even old Uti commits) to believe that a dwarf is incapable of having intense emotions and profound thoughts. Or of having a destiny. For, despite appearing like the creations of Walt Disney, a destiny is something that all of the dwarves in this book have.

The same family story told from two different, independent perspectives: Urs Widmer’s two hit novels, now in one volume.

My Mother’s Lover
Clara’s lifelong unrequited love for the famous conductor Edwin, mapped out by her son. A novel about music, money and power, and about reversing roles.

My Father’s Book
He loves friends, women, parties. Most of all, though, he loves books. The chronicle of a passionate life determined by a love of literature. And by his love for Clara Molinari, his wife.

The two novels also tell of the twentieth century’s great utopias, hopes and disappointments.