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  • Published: 2 April 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099488996
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

The Truth About Sascha Knisch



An exquisite erotic entertainment set in Weimar Germany.

'My name is Knisch, Sascha Knisch, and six days ago my life was in perfect order.'

Knisch, who works as a projectionist at the Apollo movie theatre, is a person with special sexual habits. One night, he sees the enigmatic Dora Wilms. A week later, she is dead and Knisch is charged with murder. As he tries to clear his name, he discovers a scientific conspiracy and is drawn into the rich tangle of a story in which nothing is as it seems. How can he prove what didn't happen? What goes on at the Foundation for Sexual Research? And why is it important to have testicles?

A biological thriller set in the steamy underworlds of Weimar Berlin in the sweltering summer of 1928, 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.

  • Published: 2 April 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099488996
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Aris Fioretos

Of Greek and Austrian descent, Aris Fioretos was born in 1960 and raised in Sweden. He was educated at Stockholm and Yale Universities. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, he has published several books in his native country, and also rendered the works of Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. The Truth about Sascha Knisch is his first novel in English. Aris Fioretos lives with his wife and daughter in Berlin, where he is currently the counsellor for culture at the Swedish Embassy.

Praise for The Truth About Sascha Knisch

In this noir-ish novel of 1928 Berlin, Aris Fioretos serves up an intoxicating brew distilled of equal parts murder mystery, sexological rumination, and historical farce

Jeffrey Eugenides

This incredible novel about a young man's odyssey through the sexual underground of Weimar Germany is either a comic tragedy or a tragic comedy, and it is Aris Fioretos' great achievement to keep you guessing past the last page. The Truth about Sascha Knisch is worldly, audacious, haunting in its candour and unremittingly disturbing in its prescience. Fioretos is without a doubt one of Europe's most gifted writers

Jane Kramer

A masterpiece

Frankfurter Rundschau

Fioretos has many similarities to Vladimir Nabokov... His prose style is playful, attentive and deft... By the end of this novel, the truth about Sascha Knisch may remain uncertain, but the formidable qualities of his creator have been well established

Times Literary Supplement

A stylish, intelligent and eerily entertaining novel

Independent on Sunday