Hartmut Lange's stories take place in Munich, a small town near Hamburg, on the Baltic Sea coast, on the rough northwest coast of England. And again and again in Berlin, where past and present interpenetrate each other particularly strikingly. Eight day-lit, mysteriously condensed stories that depict precarious states of mind and artfully capture them: deceptive promises of happiness, unfulfillable longing, the plight of lonely people, contact with evil, the fear of failure.