Martin Lechner - Running Wild

Powerfully eloquent, funny and expressive, the novel tells of Lars, a school drop-out who evades military service in favour of community service in the workshops of a psychiatric hospital. There, Lars finds refuge from his mother, whose abusiveness is worse than that of any raging patient. This is also where Lars meets Hanna, a patient who swiftly gets him tangled up in all manner of delightful scuffles, but whose radical attitude soon takes on a threatening scale. Was it her who torched the workshop leader’s car? How long before the flames of their passion also devour Lars’ fragile attempts to find his place in the world? And can those who’ve gone astray ever find their way back to an orderly life?

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)

Lorenz Urbach, a teacher, is increasingly troubled by a vague discomfort: a political dissatisfaction, a sense of being overwhelmed and world-weary. Suddenly he has an outburst of aggression—he gets into a fight and his life is turned upside down. When reports start to appear of a blood-thirsty animal causing trouble in the Alps, it triggers deep-seated memories in Lorenz. The media is speculating wildly—could it be a wolf? or perhaps a human being?—and Lorenz thinks of his childhood friend Theresa, the perennial outsider, the social dropout, forever primed for violence … He sets off on a solitary hike into the mountains, grappling with the forces of nature, searching both for the ‘monster’ out in the wilds and for the origins of the violence in himself.