Life on the Line

Shady characters, chilling storytelling – the reader is kept on tenterhooks until the very last page.

The shadows of the past fall across the idylliclives of elderly sisters Gunilla and Meggie. When Meggie sends her son, an unemployed computer programmer, to look for an old document in the attic of the neglected ancestral family pile, strange events begin to unfold. Bertram is knocked unconscious and awakens next to the body of a young woman, with the murder weapon in his hand. Wanting to avoid a police investigation, he attempts to get to the bottom of the crime on his own, and comes across increasing evidence suggesting that his mother and aunt are connected with the dead woman. It appears they are guarding a sinister family secret …


Katrin Askan was born in 1966 in East Berlin and escaped to West Berlin in 1986. She went on to study philosophy and German at the Free University and currently lives in Berlin, working as a fulltime author. She presented a unique assimilation of her experiences of escape to the West in the novels „A Major” and „Off The Hook”, the latter being widely considered a classic post-reunification novel. In 1998 she was awarded the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, in 1999 the City of Cologne’s Rolf-Dieter-Brinkmann grant, and in 2001 she won the 3sat-Prize at the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Competition.