In the carefully controlled, homogenized future society evoked in innovative German writer Martin Grzimek’s new novel, Shadowlife, the patterned lives of the characters turn out to be anything but orderly and serene. Ostensibly the perfect bureaucrat, Felix Seyner, top interviewer for the Central Institute for Biographics, writes a long letter to his old love, Felicitas, explaining himself and his choice of the CIB over their relationship. Her reply calls into question the truth of almost everything Felix has revealed.…

Heartstop (Stillstand des Herzens) contains three unusual and riveting stories by Martin Grzimek, a highly acclaimed young German writer. In the first, “Heartstop,” a businessman goes to a nightclub to meet his wife’s former lover but instead finds a beautiful, provocative woman. The young wife in “Timestop” would like to rid herself of her husband and does so, but in a way she did not expect. In “Finlandia,” the island in a Finnish lake where a young married couple is spending a solitary vacation turns increasingly sinister.…