When, during the eviction of his mother's apartment, a mix-up results in everything of value being incinerated, the narrator is left with literally only the refuse of his own family history. How could it have come to this? The narrator looks at his family's biography: a family tree of madness. His grandmother is bipolar, with twelve suicide attempts; his grandfather is a regular at Steinhof psychiatric hospital; his mother is an alcoholic; his father is depressed. And he looks at his own path: a childhood in a working-class district of Munich; the early fear of going insane; the escape from his family to distant New York; years in Vienna with Freud in coffeehouses; and how he ultimately ends up in the institution—as a psychologist. Working with patients, he learns that a person is always more than their illness, that listening is more important than diagnosing. Above all, however, he soon has to ask himself what a normal person is supposed to be. A family history gone awry? A picaresque novel? A lesson in empathy? Leon Engler's debut is all that and more, a tender act of liberation, the story of a reconciliation. New product