It is seven years since Franz Tone awoke to find his wife had died. Now dependent on his wife's miserly niece, he is losing the will to live. Can he find love and fulfillment again?

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933), and appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy...

A young woman from a noble family fallen on hard times, Leonore Griebel marries an older businessman. Brought up on the romantic stories of her ancestors, Leonore must find a way to reconcile herself to the marriage, her new son and ... the house.

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933), and...

"And between the night's rise and fall, the hourly chimes of human existence swing in a quite narrow space. Their tone is eternal desire in miserable struggle and bitterest sweetness."

Two souls come together in an inauspicious marriage and struggle towards their intertwined fates.

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe...

"We all do not know how often we have been driven into that strange state, and perhaps it is really an everlasting trick of scared, weak souls to escape responsibility by such a confusion of their inner existence."

Four short stories mainly set in late nineteenth century Silesia.

• The Shimmer of the Assistant: a surreal story about a clerk who fails to get a pay-rise.
• The Last Act: a banker's past deeds come back to haunt him over an evening in a tavern.
• The Grandmother: a grandmother with a reputation for saving dying people tries to save her grandson...

Four novellas/short stories translated from German into English for the first time.

• "The Twilight" An old woman decides to end it all, but not before telling a few home-truths to her husband.
• "The Last Child" Dead souls become angels that do the work of taking souls to and from the earth. But what happens when an angel is sent to retrieve the soul of his infant brother? Will he be able to do it? Will his mother stop him carrying off her last child like all the others?
• "The Tale of the Rustling" A fable of how the sounds of nature came into the world.
...

The young doctor Paul Hein moves from the provinces to Berlin to make his career. There he encounters all the temptations of the big city. Will his decency and his love for his fiance survive amidst the charms of the metropolis?

And yet the wanderer sometimes pulled up, and looked with dull astonishment down the endless rows of houses. They were precisely the same buildings which he had admired on his arrival a year before, the same shops, the same streets, only he had changed, a being who only accidentally bore his name, transformed, converted, bewitched, ruined by the wand of this...