“So, no sex, no god, no dreams” – otherwise Lu will talk about anything. She tells her parents that she’s going to kickboxing camp for two weeks. Actually, she has decided to take some time off and rents a room in a Bed and Breakfast called “Zur schönen Gegenwart” (the beautiful now). Lu is 16 and she doesn’t have a story, not a real one, not yet. But she can talk like others breathe. In the B’n’B she meets Tulpe Valentin, an old author who has written eight novels, but finished the last one years ago. She thinks she has left her life behind along with her writing. The time off that Valentin and her ill B’n’B neighbor are taking is more like waiting for the right moment to give up. “A punch hurts less if you see it coming.” But then Lu comes along and starts talking and Valentin listens and writes it all down – it’s her last novel, because she sees life right in front of her. It’s not her own, but another life is continuing.

Journalist Martin Koller is in hospital and cannot sleep. He is tortured by strange sounds in his ear that have thrown him into a deep depression. The fact that his wife desperately wants a child from him and that a young, ambitious colleague is messing with his research in the right-wing extremist scene isn’t exactly helping. Then he finds out that his mother is on the brink of death. So he pulls himself together and heads back to his childhood home. He spends a few days alone with his mother. And then, the visitors start showing up and taking over the entire house. They’re all over the place: in the cellar, in the rooms, in the attic. No one knows where they came from, no one knows what they want. A doctor Martin has known since his youth calls and tells him that she has made a mysterious discovery. A nightmare begins.

Karl May met Franz Kafka on a ship to the United States. Fact or a brilliant piece of fiction? In his mind, the adventure author Karl May visited the United States a million times. But it is not until September 1908 that the 66 year-old, accompanied by his second wife, Klara, actually boards ship to New York in Bremerhaven. As fate will have it, Karl May meets the famous Franz Kafka on board. The very gaunt and very pale young man is standing at the railing. God forbid, is he about to throw himself into the sea? Who else but Karl May and his much younger wife could save him for the sake of life and literature? The ensuing love triangle completes the ingredients to this great story. Peter Henisch’s novel is a hilarious fantasy, an intimate novel settled somewhere between fact and fiction. With lightness, yet lots of sensitivity he succeeds in joining what we were drilled to keep apart from an early age: Franz Kafka vs. Karl May, high vs. low culture, living a lie vs. living in fear. It comes as no surprise that this book sends sparks flying!