Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Harper & Row), France (Albin Michel), Netherlands (De Boekerij), Sweden (Norstedts), Turkey (Can)
Dead Alive is a novel about love in a time of great political unrest. In sensitive but never sentimental prose, Eva Demski tells the story of a woman faced with the challenge of fathoming a life in death and of coming to terms with memories and doubts, mourning and loss in the process.
Frankfurt am Main, 1974. A lawyer is found dead in his chambers. The circumstances of his death remain a mystery. The police begin their investigation: He had been a lawyer for the leftist scene, his clientele included members of the RAF, rockers, junkies, and rent-boys.
His wife, who had been living apart from him for three years, begins to grapple with her husband again: with his work, his life – and their love. What does she really know about this man whom she used to love, whom she knew so well?
Soon the police begin to investigate the widow as well; she is suspected of being an accessory to political activities, even as she begins to receive coded messages from the political underground. She turns to his colleagues for help, emissaries from the demimonde, comrades and former revolutionaries, who lead her ever further down the rabbit hole. As she delves deeper into her dead husband’s secret life, she begins to realise that she never knew him at all.
Eva Demski has been with her garden for fifty years now. Time to think about what things should be like moving forward. In her New Garden Stories, she talks about challenges she would never have dreamed of. It’s not just climate change and dealing with the fear of a virus that are giving her a hard time, but also her own age and box hedges that have been ripped out. The only thing that...
God wants it that way. The state wants it that way. Your father wants it that way. But why is there a superior, invisible entity that tells me what to do, what not to do, what to think, what to believe, which profession to have and whom to love? Anarchism puts us on a political and philosophical merry-go-round of which you don’t know when it will stop. Anarchism is not satisfied with...
Despite the odds, a life which shouldn’t have been at all becomes colourful and exciting. Being a constant part of this life, farewells can be countered by encounters and stories though the feeling that this is all a game continues throughout unabated. Eva Demski gathers together others’ lives, those both known and unknown; leading lights of literature like Reich-Ranicki, Koeppen, Kempowski,...