Late summer in the year 1900 in the Bavarian Forest. Standing on a hill, the young labourer Maria looks down at her village. The glass factory that employs the local people is engulfed in flames. Maria herself has started the fire as revenge for a rape that went unpunished.

In the night of the devastating fire begins the story of a family that centres around the rise of Georg Schatzschneider from being the illegitimate son of a servant to directing a big corporation. But where unrestrained ambition and entrepreneurial instinct ostensibly become the guarantee for success in a breath-taking career in the formerly divided, then reunited Germany, in the background generation after generation of the family atones for a great wrong that originated from a white lie, for a guilt with which Georg’s ancestors burdened the following generations.

In his first novel, The Unexpected, award-winning playwright Christoph Nußbaumeder tells a gripping and moving family saga that spans across four generations; an epos about society and ambitions that debates the battles of distribution and resistance movements of an entire century up to the immediate present while dealing with the eternal fuel for the great tragedies of humanity at the same: love, betrayal and mankind’s insatiable need for recognition.