Und Ruth

On the way back to his little shack on a vineyard near the Black Forest, the narrator receives a phone call that turns his world upside down. His partner Ina has had a serious accident while freediving. She is placed in an induced coma, and nobody knows whether she has suffered brain damage, whether she will ever wake up again at all. In the days that follow, he is terrified that she won’t...

A man and a woman meet late in life and experience once again deep affection and happiness, in everyday life and on travels to the landscape of his youth – the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. But their delights are soon joined by the infirmities of old age, Jakov becomes increasingly forgetful.

A name fails to materialise, an appointment is missed, a garbage bag is thrown into the...

After years abroad a man returns to the forlorn yet familiar valley in the Black Forest. He walks the old paths through the heavy snow, remembers the bitter inheritance dispute surrounding his...

Request Stop is Urs Faes' most intimate book to date, which grew out of his personal experience of sickness and was written so as to be able to hold on to a pen, to words, to images and to memory. Writing as self-defence against one’s own frailty – and in so doing, coming face to face with life.

Immediately after diagnosis, he is...