Hartmut Hainbach is in his late fifties and has achieved everything he ever wished for: he is professor of philosophy and married to his dream woman, whom he still loves after twenty years of marriage. And yet Hartmut is not content: his wife has moved to Berlin, leaving Hartmut alone in the former German capital of Bonn. Now they only see each other at weekends.

Their daughter lives in Portugal and keeps her parents at arm’s length. And with the structural reforms in European higher education, Hartmut is finding it hard to take pleasure in his work. When he receives a surprise job offer at an up-and-coming Berlin publishing house, he finally wants to know where he stands: in his relationship to his daughter, in his marriage, but also in relation to himself and this life in which he thought all the most important decisions had already been made long ago.

Three years after his critically and publically acclaimed debut Grenzgang (over 60,000 copies sold, shortlisted for the 2009 German Book Prize), in Stephan Thome’s latest novel Centrifugal Forces, we watch as another character begins to stumble and fall. With a breathtakingly acute sense of failure and for the things that really hurt, Thome sends his protagonist on a journey that will decide everything. Via France and Spain, it leads him to Lisbon and into his past, where he will have to face the disavowals and abysses of the life he has lived.

Counterplay