A Houseful of Ghosts

Growing up in an isolated farm house in a tiny place by the name of Hollenbrinck, with an idiosyncratic mother and a taciturn father, four sisters, the hunchbacked Uncle Franz and the eccentric Great-Aunt Helene, a three-legged dog called Wotan and a rather bad cat, Clara Wiesenbaum has a childhood that is simultaneously sheltered and charmed, filled with fantastical stories and bizarre occurrences, and nurturing both magic and imagination. Until the day of the tragic accident that changes everything. The novel describes the life of two men – the journalist Ben Kohlmann and the theatre director Raimund Broder – and that of a woman – the stage designer Clara Wiesenbaum – as an unpredictable journey from Hollenbrinck to Frankfurt am Main, Zürich, Basel and London. It is a journey with life and death as travel companions, a journey that is interrupted by a crime and that repeatedly plays with the forces of chance that seem to interfere arbitrarily in everyone’s life, causing confusion and yet, ultimately, revealing a surprising logic. It is a simultaneously tragic and comical story about the search for love, for a home and for happiness, a story in which guilt, truths and lies all play their part. A story about escapes, great and small, about family and its formative influence from beyond the grave. And, last but not least, it is a story about career, fame and the price that must be paid for them. Death intervenes unrelentingly in the life of the protagonists, not without an absurd humour on occasions, but it also opens doors to new beginnings, assuming, that is, that they take the opportunity and go through them.