On a rainy November day, police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

The crime story takes place in 1992, just after the political transformation in former Czechoslovakia. Commissioner Krauz (very young, cheeky, quick and inexperienced, but promising) investigates a murder. The clues lead to the former communist political police and church services. In the new order, both the Church (preparing to return to big politics) and the former security officers who are...

The Stranger is the debut work of a young writer, a kind of creative manifesto. The concept of absolute freedom is the main postulate of this manifesto. The hero of this story is on trial for a murder he committed for the most stupid of all possible reasons. And this is the truth that the hero is not afraid to throw in the face of his judges, go against everything, forget about all conventions...

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

This selection from his extensive lyrical work enables many discoveries and allows you to experience how Rilke ‘made the German poem perfect for the first time’ (Robert Musil). With a compact biography of the author.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a...

One of the most intense yet absorbing studies ever done of a normal man's descent into drunkenness.

Vasyl Symonenko (1935–1963) is a poetic legend of the ‘sixties’ as a social and artistic movement. His poems were not allowed to be printed by Soviet censorship, so they were distributed in self-published lists and copied by hand - by teachers, professors and farmers.

The Glass Bead Game is an ultra-aesthetic game which is played by the scholars, creamed off in childhood and nurtured in elite schools, in the province of Castalia. The Master of the Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, holds the most exalted office in Castalia. He personifies the detachment, serenity and aesthetic vision which reward a life dedicated to perfection of the intellect. But can, indeed...

Seventeen-year-old Molly Peskin-Suso knows all about unrequited love. No matter how many times her twin sister, Cassie, tells her to woman up, Molly can’t stomach the idea of rejection. So she’s careful. Fat girls always have to be careful. Then a cute new girl enters Cassie’s orbit, and for the first time ever, Molly’s cynical twin is a lovesick mess. Meanwhile, Molly's totally not dying of...

Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri’s poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise—the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man's touch—and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for Avery, Hawthorne House is also occupied by the family that Tobias Hawthorne just dispossessed. This includes the four Hawthorne grandsons: dangerous, magnetic, brilliant boys who grew up with...