Belgrade, 1995: Marko, his sister Vanja and Kasandra from the Roma settlement live in the "giant psycho-economical disaster" of 1990s Belgrade – a vicious circle of poverty, violence, inflation, drugs and new technologies. Yet in this inspired novel there aren't just gangs and dealers, there's also a crazy scientist and a time machine, there's a Balkan pop icon and kinky sex, there are bombardments and destruction, but also music and friendship. When the three young friends are catapulted into the war year of 1999, they realise that they have to rescue their city from the disastrous 90s. In a headlong race against the ticking clock they try to find the key to the time warp and re-write history.

Every Saturday, three superheroines meet in a run-down café called Sette Fontane. There is Mascha, the brave supportive one, Direktorka, the inexperienced one ready for adventure, and Marija's granddaughter who has a flexible conscience and revenge in her veins. The three have dark, chaotic powers and want to bring justice to Vienna's suburbs as they plan a futile uprising of the middle class. "Lightening of Fate" and "Annihilation" are the weapons that grandma Marija already successfully used to destabilize an entire country. After failed appearances and painful years of learning in Berlin, Belgrade, Sarajevo and other cities, our three superheroines ultimately find triumph in the darkest of all happy ends.

Fast-paced and humorous, Cordula Simon's biting novel describes a future that is worryingly close to our present. Surveillance and self-regulation by means of an implanted log have become common place – those who don't participate attract suspicion. When Sandor, the weatherman on Honest Airwaves reveals the destructive intentions of the Tolerance Union while on air, the regime's response is merciless. He is persecuted relentlessly, just like the "Wolves of Pripyat", an alleged terrorist group that fights against the Consul who reigns over the Union with supposed benevolence. Simon's sweeping novel is a hallucinatory vision of a future in which even the longed-for freedom is no more than a digitally generated illusion, a particularly cunning trick of the system.

In Anemos, a post-apocalyptic irradiated city, a precariously balanced community of mixed beings and mutants has formed - for their common survival they need the luminous jellyfish Oberon, who ensures the city's water supply, but also the antlered Titania, who takes care of the city's wild festivals. But one year the festival of Walpurgis ends with Oberon's death in love - and the little slime animal Müxerl has to take over Oberon's duties, because: What you break, you must fix, so demands the law of Anemos. What, asks Elisabeth Klar, comes after the Anthropocene? And what laws can a society make for itself in order not only to survive under adverse circumstances, but also to want to live?