Lechner's stories collide like waves. They pass on words, images, or moods, flow into one another and yet, remain self-contained. They are uncanny and high-spirited and tell us about desperate lakes and knees to fall in love with. They are about films we vaguely remember and brightly lit cities, silently bursting bubbles of blood and summers long brushed aside. They are all at home in a language where something new and unexpected awaits behind each turn. Lechner achieves this feat with humor, the absurd and sentences that give us a touch of the ungraspable.

Apprentice Georg Rohrs isn't the sharpest tool in the box. But he has a dream: he wants to be the elevator boy in a seaside hotel, wants to escape on the night train with his first love Marlies and escape the confinement of his life at home. When Georg happens upon a dead body and accidentally steals his boss's suitcase full of dirty cash, his life begins to unravel: within a single weekend Georg loses his job, his apartment, his parents, his friends, his money, his love and maybe a piece of his sanity – and yet, at the end of this neck-breaking tour-de-force, an unknown sense of freedom awaits him... Martin Lechner's fast-paced debut novel is a whirlwind adventure where provincial comedy meets literary genius. Nominated for the German Book Prize 2014 (Longlist)

Apprentice Georg Rohrs isn't the sharpest tool in the box. But he has a dream: he wants to be the elevator boy in a seaside hotel, wants to escape on the night train with his first love Marlies and escape the confinement of his life at home. When Georg happens upon a dead body and accidentally steals his boss's suitcase full of dirty cash, his life begins to unravel: within a single weekend Georg loses his job, his apartment, his parents, his friends, his money, his love and maybe a piece of his sanity – and yet, at the end of this neck-breaking tour-de-force, an unknown sense of freedom awaits him... Martin Lechner's fast-paced debut novel is a whirlwind adventure where provincial comedy meets literary genius. Nominated for the German Book Prize 2014 (Longlist)

Lechner's stories collide like waves. They pass on words, images, or moods, flow into one another and yet, remain self-contained. They are uncanny and high-spirited and tell us about desperate lakes and knees to fall in love with. They are about films we vaguely remember and brightly lit cities, silently bursting bubbles of blood and summers long brushed aside. They are all at home in a language where something new and unexpected awaits behind each turn. Lechner achieves this feat with humor, the absurd and sentences that give us a touch of the ungraspable.

Jay Immer, son of Austrian immigrants, loving husband and a dutiful Chicago policeman, is 55 when the American dream catches up with him. He is elected to be the 40th president of the United States or, more accurately, his double. From that point on, he acts as a substitute for Ronald Reagan wherever Reagan can’t be – at shopping mall inaugurations and burger eating competitions, at parties and photo calls. But when Jay discovers his own voice and becomes involved in the environmental movement, cracks start to form in the idyll. Touching, highly topical and full of tragicomical humour, Clemens Berger’s narrative peers behind the facade of power and tells the unforgettable story of a man who stepped onto the stage of global politics to provide a swimming pool for his wife Lucy.