« It’s the story of a German family. My own, as it happens. » Jo Lendle
EINE ART FAMILIE
(A Kind of Family)
by Jo Lendle
Penguin Germany, August 2021
We don’t choose the times we live in nor the times that shape us. Neither did Lud and Alma. Lud, who was born in 1899, and his brother Wilhelm revere Bach and Hölderlin, and share the same unattainable ideals. Wilhelm, who joins the Nazi party early on, measures others according to its standards; Lud measures himself by them, which torments him for the rest of his life. Alma lost her parents when she was a child, and her godfather Lud – who is only a few years older than her – and his housekeeper become a kind of new family for her.
Lud is a pharmacology professor specialising in sleep and its induction, and while he spends his days at the university Alma is left home alone, unable to stop thinking about him. When he starts researching poison gas, he doesn’t tell her about it. His struggle with his lofty ideals grows ever more desperate – for he can’t get Gerhard, the man alongside whom he fought in the First World War, out of his head.
Taking us on a journey from the days of the German empire to National Socialism, the early days of the GDR and post-war West Germany, Jo Lendle’s scintillating novel is the story of a family falling apart, of guilt, of the meaning of science, and of the subtle difference between sleep, anaesthesia and death. It is the story of a German family – which just so happens to be his own.
Jo Lendle was born in 1968. After studying cultural education and animation culturelle, he joined the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, edited the literary magazine Edit and has been a visiting professor and lecturer at several universities. He was awarded the Leipzig Promotion Prize for Literature in 1997. Since January 2014 he is head of the Hanser publishing house.
Twelve-year-old Henrietta, whom everyone calls Henry, lives in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district and is longing for adventure. When her overprotective mother leaves her brand-new BMW on the street with her daughter asleep on the back seat, a young man gets into the unlocked car and drives off. He was only going to drive it round the block, but when Henry wakes up she convinces him to drive on. Sven, his girlfriend Nadja and Henry take off on a road trip, and the exuberant, taboo-breaking trio become a close-knit team as they take a journey that will change their lives for ever. 
Sander has been on the run ever since 1572, when he saw his father murdered at the hands of the Spanish invaders in Flanders. He meets a master who teaches him how to paint flowers, while his brother Hugo, who hasn’t spoken a word since their parents’ death, mixes the paints for him. But Hugo is as unreliable and quick to anger as he is gentle, and when he commits a violent crime, he and Sander have to flee. They find refuge in an artist’s studio in Rome, witness the Pope’s dissipation, are caught up in the intrigues proliferating in the Neapolitan cardinal’s palace, and – both in their own special way – experience the joy of forbidden love. In the course of their adventures, Sander repeatedly finds a way out of seemingly hopeless situations … 
John Devereaux, an SAS Warrant Officer, is seconded to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and handed a mission that will test him to his very core – both professionally and personally. The operationally deniable mission: infiltrate into Cambodia via parachute in the dead of night and assassinate two high-value targets, alone, and with two dozen enemy soldiers in his way. From the relentless jungles of Cambodia to the chaotic civilian-filled streets of Sydney and Bangkok, to the secretive dens of Moscow and the extravagant French Riviera, explosive SAS and ASIS action uncovers a shadowy and powerful organisation that brings us face to face with the Russian Mafia, and an assassin getting intimate. Unbeknown to Devereaux, the Director-General of the Secret Intelligence Service, Magnus Webb, is testing him for a far more important role – to head an off-the-books clandestine cell buried deep inside this secret organisation and known only as MANTRA-6. Devereaux’s mission has only just begun …
In the early hours of Christmas morning in 1986, the body of an older woman was discovered inside a wheelie bin in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. There were no clues and no suspects. After an extensive investigation, the police admitted defeat and filed it as a cold case. It is a case that taunts them still. Eddie Russell’s debut conjures a plausible motive to this strange crime in this artfully wrought, page-turning story which takes the reader from Utrecht to Berlin, to Auschwitz, and finally, to a sleepy neighbourhood in Sydney, Australia.