Sten Nadolny

The naked, charcoal-colored man with red hair who steals the flag from the police station in Greece on a sunny Spring day obviously isn't ordinary; indeed, it could be said - and it would be true - that he is, well, extraordinary. He is none other than Hermes, god of stolen kisses, insolence, erotic freedom, turmoil, sleep, thievery, and messenger to the gods. Hermes is looking for adventure and love, preferably the physical kind. He has been liberated to enchant, to save the world from the corruption of crass cynicism and to resurrect virtues of mischief, curiosity, imagination, and daring...and to fall in love. Unsurprisingly, Hermes' new world seems very, very weird to him - after all, he was kept in chains in a volcanic crater for 2,187 years. Meanwhile, Zeus has been disempowered and escapes to America - where he plays rounds of golf in Missouri - after his wife, Hera, discovers haute couture. Hephaestus, that degenerate, neurotic god of volcanoes, is now "the chief." He has advanced from the blacksmith of old into the commander of human technology and lord of a world driven by computers. Even Ares, the god of war, is subservient to Hephaestus. Even though Hermes finds himself in a strange and confusing age, unsure of why he was freed, this emblem of piratical daring crisscrosses the world in amazement, chasing...who else but a light-skinned beauty. His travels lead him from Europe to Athens (Georgia), to Sparta (Illinois) and, yes, above and beyond human boundaries. On his odyssey, tapping the minds and "having the ear" of brain specialists, rappers, graffiti artists, Hermes realizes that he must supercharge those qualities of impertinence and roguery with godlike impetus. It is the only way he himself can survive. To do so, however, he first has to lead Hephaestus back into the fold of the family...or defeat him...or both.

Framing the life of the 19th-century explorer Sir John Franklin, this novel explores not only the adventures of his career, but also enters a world where the quality of life is considered in "slow motion", where ordinary experience becomes wholly new and unexpected.

"As a young boy in Germany before the First World War, Pahroc discovers that he has special abilities. He can lengthen his arm at will, reaching out to pluck a cherry ten feet away; he can absorb all of the information in a book by placing two fingers on its spine; he can appear to others in the form of a crocodile: He is a sorcerer. Pahroc finds his own community of sorcerers, including Emma, the woman he marries, and as the years pass, he becomes one of the great masters of his secret calling. He works as a radio technician, then an inventor, then a psychotherapist, and the outside world never knows that he can fly through the air unassisted or walk through walls. Being able to temporarily turn to steel or conjure money from nothing prove crucial to surviving and ushering his growing family through the Second World War. Now, at 106, Pahroc's greatest concern is passing on his art to his infant granddaughter Mathilda, the only one of his many descendants to have revealed talents like his own. In the twelve letters which form this book, he writes down his life for her. It is the witty, endearing, and surprising story of a man with his own special way of resisting the disenchantment of the world"-- Pahroc writes about his extraordinary life in twentieth-century Germany for his young granddaughter, who, like him, has secret magical abilities.