The Truth About Sascha Knisch

"My name is Knisch, Sascha Knisch, and six days ago my life was in perfect order." So begins Aris Fioretos's elegant, hilarious novel, set in Berlin in the sweltering summer of 1928. Knisch, who works as a projectionist at the Apollo movie theatre, is a person with special sexual habits. When the woman who indulges these habits, the enigmatic Dora Wilms, is found dead, Knisch is charged with murder. As he tries to clear his name, he discovers a scientific conspiracy at the secretive Foundation for Sexual Research and is drawn into the rich tangle of a story.

The Truth About Sascha Knisch deals with the so-called "sexual question," its lures and seductiveness, dangers and temptations, but also with the shrewd passion between two young people in a Germany at the brink of disaster. Above all, the novel is a declaration of love to imagination--clever, droll and stylish, couched in the form of a riddle and written with effortless élan by one of Europe's most exciting and entertaining new writers.