Wolfram Fleischhauer was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1961 and developed a passion for foreign cultures at an early age. He spent a year abroad at an American high school before going on to study comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin and at the University of California-Irvine. He has lived in Spain, France, Italy, and Belgium and traveled on four continents. His eight novels, which combine expert American storytelling with the thematic richness of the wider European tradition, have sold more than half a million copies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.