Fremde Seele, dunkler Wald

A deeply human novel about family tragedies and entanglements, told with epic power

Alexander leaves the small village he grew up in and joins the army. A restless soul, he pays only sporadic visits home, leaving his younger brother Jakob to run the family farm on his own while their father secretly sells off piece by piece the land they are to inherit. As time passes, it’s the unfathomable that determines their lives: people perish, a woman is murdered, seemingly without a motive, a young man hangs himself; there are rumours about someone being blackmailed.

With great poetic calm and atmospheric strength, Reinhard Kaiser-Mühlecker tells about people who are bound by kinship, by murder and by a longing to escape all this: the entanglement, the accursed talk, the tightness of the place they live in and the tense atmosphere of a close-knit community. A timeless story of two brothers who are looking for salvation.