This Side of Heaven

After their plane nearly goes down as they prepare to land, eight people eventually make it to their destination on a Mediterranean island. An idyllic paradise with gorgeous bays, boatloads of sun, picturesque architecture, and bars and cafés on every corner. It should be the perfect holiday, but something seems off. The scenery looks washed out, and the locals are strangely absent, as if they were living in another dimension. And where are the other passengers who were on the plane with them?

As usual, Claudius has paid for everything, not just for Elisabeth and himself, but also for his old uni friends Annike and Benedikt. Claudius always foots the bill. Because he can. Sara and Marc, meanwhile, are here with their son, Vincent, who is gravely ill. It might be the last time the three of them get to go on holiday together. But were it not for Vincent, Sara and Marc would have split years ago. And then there is Heidi, who has just sold one of her start-ups and is waiting for the next big idea to come along – a perfect distraction from the one thing she desperately wants to avoid thinking about.

In this little seaside town, the paths of these eight characters intersect continually. They get together, they fight, they love each other, or they don’t. A typical holiday, really. But the things that at the outset seemed just a little bit strange begin to grow bigger. The black hole on the horizon is expanding by the minute, while the island itself and everything on it seems to be shrinking. Gradually, they begin to realise that their brush with death on the plane was actually much more than that, and that they are stuck somewhere between the living and the dead.

In this clever contemporary comedy, Simone Buchholz weaves Greek mythology together with the most modern problems of everyday life to show that often, it’s only the dead who really know how to live.

»Simone Buchholz sends her characters through heaven and hell, and as always, it's not just a matter of life and death, but of existence itself.« Mithu Sanyal

»This novel manages no less than to relieve us of our fear of death.« MDR

«Luckily, there are people like Simone Buchholz, who can write … these kinds of wonderful, consoling and joyful novels.» Andrea Gerk, WDR 3