NOVEL
Heating, Cooling, Stirring, Time: A Novel about Chemistry
There are young people for whom science is everything. Following his dream of one day becoming a research scientist, young Pavel moves from Dublin, Ireland—where he lives with his mother and where he has just graduated from university—to Basel, Switzerland, to pursue his PhD in medicinal chemistry. At first, his PhD supervisor, Prof. Alois Messerli, seems charismatic and avuncular, but immediately starts putting immense pressure on Pavel to meet deadlines as well as fit into his rigid research-group concept.
SHORT STORY
The Dread of Being in Love Again
Alex is an expat who lives and works in Bern, Switzerland. He has been a postdoc at the same Department of Biochemistry for more years than he would like. He is also single and lonely. One day he meets, Nadja, an attractive undergraduate student, and they begin a modern cat-and-mouse dating game that inevitably involves text messaging and its consequences.
SHORT STORY
Poor Peacocks
Dr Antonio Bertolini is the head of a private and exclusive psychiatric clinic in Locarno, Switzerland. But, after a glamorous French actress arrives for treatment and then abruptly leaves, even he cannot figure out what happened to his two beloved pet peacocks.
MEMOIR
A Car that Ran on Envy and Pure Joy
In this memoir, Oleg Khorev realizes that some of his dearest and most important memories from his childhood are associated with his grandfather’s car. The author remembers growing up in Moscow in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. His grandfather owned a Japanese car, a Nissan Cedric, an ultrarare thing to have in the drab, communist country, where owning a car—let alone a Japanese one—was uncommon. The story also deals with emigration, his grandfather’s life in post-Soviet Russia of the “Wild 90s”, and the fate of the car at the start of a new century.