An intricate web of sex, power and money.

Gisela Stern has made it. Coming from a modest background, she managed to marry into a wealthy family, made a career for herself working at a bank and became part of the social elite. And yet, something is missing. She feels a sense of unfulfilled desire, of not quite belonging. When a good-looking, ambitious man enters her life, the carousel of power starts to spin, spinning out of control as politics and desire become more and more entangled… Peter Rosei’s novel – true to his typically laconic style – is the masterful staging of a woman’s rise and fall in the complicated web of a highly corrupt society. A sharp-witted and multifaceted novel.

Stories of a house: about life under one roof, between walls and doors. And love comes and goes like its residents.

Just look at Konrad, the architect. When he and Dora moved into the house, she was expecting; eleven years later she has left him together with their daughter Katharina. At 16, Katharina moves in again, and Konrad fills the fridge for her. And he brings out a model of his dream house, built in his lonesome years. Konrad doesn’t see that his daughter is disappearing in front of his eyes because she stopped eating. He also doesn’t see Marie, the doctor living downstairs, who falls in love with him and finds Katharina after her breakdown. This story and all the others in this book open on two sides, just like doors leading from one room to another. Gudrun Seidenauer opens the doors to a whole universe within confined spaces, merging past and present. In brilliant style and with a keen sense for the psychology of humans, she tells the stories a house would tell if it were more than a silent witness.

The moving testimony of an exceptional relationship.

Alma Mahler-Werfel was the epitome of a creative muse and a tantalizing femme fatale. She was married to composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, writer Franz Werfel and the lover of painter Oskar Kokoschka, while her seductiveness also gained her influence far into the spheres of church and politics. Her correspondence with Arnold Schönberg, however, shows a new side of her strong personality. It is now available for the first time. Haide Tenner compiled a selection of letters from the more than 40 years of this special relationship. They show Alma Mahler the sponsor, patron and fighter for the ones she believed in, and they tell the story of a sometimes problematic friendship, of wounded pride on both parts, of loneliness and mutual appreciation in their shared exile. An insightful testimony, the impressive legacy of a friendship spanning half a century.

Master of marvelling, failure in believing: on being an anachronistic contemporary.

“I was a master of marvelling and a failure in believing,” Amanshauser once wrote on himself. In this attitude, open-minded and extremely sceptical at the same time, he spent decades in his lookout high up on Salzburg’s Festungsberg hill. Secluded, but not isolated; withdrawn, but not indifferent. With ingenuity and acuity, a playful humour and unapologetic seriousness he defended his convictions - against all forms of dogmatism, banality and megalomania. All his books tell this story; most of all, however, do his diaries - a seleciton of them is now published for the first time. The observations and self-reflections in this book, alert, irritated, brilliant, scornful, dreamy and relentless to the point where Parkinson’s disease began its work of destruction, remind the reader how much Gerhard Amanshauser is missing in our time.

Ein Thema, drei Blickwinkel: Wovon Poeten, Twitterer und Schluckspechte reden, wenn es ums Zwitschern geht.

The whole world is buzzing and tweeting, in one way or the other, and this is what this book is about. Franz Schuh, a masterful essayist, looks deeper into the existence of boozers and their veering between the utopia of autonomy and the reality of dependency, proofing that suffering and depravation have a great say in who or what humans are. And if Twitter really played a crucial role in the Arab Spring uprisings, there must be more to it than empty tweeting, right? asks Kathrin Passig. And finally, the question on the links between poetry and birds’ twittering is answered by a double expert: Helwig Brunner is both one of the most important young poets in the German-speaking world and a keen ornithologist.

Comfort and advice plus wisdom and wit: more stories on life among fellow humans, men and children.

Love is blind – and that’s why it is so beautiful to be in love. It’s easy to be forgiving when you don’t see further than the rim of love’s rose-colored glasses or the slices of cucumber you put on your eyes to keep love fresh. Still, of course, the world behind those glasses is rough and flawed, full of challenges and obstacles. Losing sight of that will soon leave you stumbling through your life with housework and relationships, husband and kids. Christine Nöstlinger tells the stories of such a life like no other, stories she stumbled across herself, and she does so in a clear-sighted, trenchant, ironic but always loving way.

An amusing book for philosophy lovers about the deeply human nature of human nature.

Philosophy starts with someone thinking unhealthy thoughts. The philosopher in this book however, is not some wacky freelancer. No, he is a civil servant living in a humble civil servant’s apartment with a lifelong job guarantee like it is no longer found in today’s world. As an upright civil servant he never tires of explaining the nature of his special subject to young people: “Philosophizing means learning to relax!” Together with his companions, the full-blooded pug Paul, the two guinea pigs Fritzi & Fratzi and his friend Idiot, our lover of wisdom stumbles through life, shaking, but determined to face each apocalypse that life confronts him with.

A small-town policeman faces a mountain of corpses: this is not a regular crime novel

In late April 1945 hundreds of Jewish forced laborers from Hungary on the death trail heading to Mauthausen end up in a refugee camp in Persenbeug on the Danube. The frontlines both east and west are as close as the end of the war. The Second Republic has already been proclaimed in nearby Vienna and Adolf Hitler is already dead when a motorized SS taskforce covertly attacks the camp and massacres 223 people in a bloodbath. Hardly anybody admits to having seen or heard anything, but inspector Franz Winkler, a Deputy Commander left to his own devices in this remote town, begins to investigate. He risks his head to save his skin. Will he manage to save the nine survivors of the massacre? Manfred Wieninger documents one of the most extraordinary criminal cases in Austrian history while maintaining a fine balance between historical report and fictitious elements. He turns history into a story, in which the victims are no longer nameless.

First love and buried hopes: the summer that changed everything.

As a seventeen year-old, Anastasia spends an entire summer in Ephesus instead of accompanying her mother, a dancer, and her constantly changing lovers on a trip through the United States. During the dig she learns more about her father’s lifelong obsession, which destroyed more than her parents’ marriage – Ephesus, the city that had only existed in her dreams and in the books her father, a famous archeologist, had written. She also meets Hubert again, her first love and her father’s favorite student, who once upon a time was a permanent fixture in her parents’ home. That summer, Anastasia still believes that her future is just beginning, but then the season ends in disaster… When she hears of her father’s death many years later, she finds out what actually happened that summer and before. And why he and Hubert wanted nothing to do with her as soon as that summer was over.

The life journey of a remarkable young woman in a century full of extremes: a touching, powerfully eloquent and vivid novel.

“Anna was born in Vienna on December 3, 1909, as the second eldest of the four daughters of glass painting master Franz Goetzer.” This is the laconic beginning of Erika Pluhar’s new novel. It tells the story of a highly talented woman who studies at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts between the two World Wars and dreams of leading a self-determined life. However, her emigration to Brazil, her marriage and most of all, the early stages of Nazi fascism keep her from fulfilling her lifelong dream for many years. Erika Pluhar paints an empathetic and insightful picture of the hopes, desires and fears that Anna feels as a young woman coming of age in a century full of political extremes. Austria, Brazil, Germany and Poland are stations in a life that takes several unexpected turns.