Vienna, 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist Dr Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering...

Hotel du Lac is the classic Booker Prize winning novel by Anita Brookner. Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home...

On the night of 22 December 1980, a plane crashes on the Franco-Swiss border and is engulfed in flames. 168 out of 169 passengers are killed instantly. The miraculous sole survivor is a three-month-old baby girl. Two families, one...

Verbier. Exclusive Swiss ski resort and the winter playground of the rich and famous = every chalet girl’s dream! Good for: Maximum time on the ski slopes – and in the bars at night! Looking for flings – or...

What would you do if you woke up to see a living, breathing, tiny, glowing, pink elephant? If you’re anything like Schoch, who lives on the streets of Zürich and is decidedly down on his luck, you might well...

Miles Pussett is a former steeplechase jockey. Now he gets his adrenaline rush from riding down the Cresta Run, a three-quarter-mile Swiss ice chute, head first, reaching speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. Finding himself in St Moritz...

By day, Judith Rashleigh is a put-upon assistant at a London auction house. By night she’s a hostess in one of the capital’s unsavoury bars. Desperate to make something of herself, Judith knows she has to play the game....

Twelve people. Twelve star signs. Sagittarius – Holly, a travel writer, visits Tuscany to research her next book. Seeking help when her car breaks down, she gets more than assistance when Dario, a vineyard owner, puts temptation in her...

As the financial crisis tightens its grip on Europe, the gilded world of Zurich’s leading restaurant, Chez Huwyler, seems immune to plunging stock markets and collapsing banks. But behind the scenes, even the rarefied world of haute cuisine is...

The book is divided into two parts: It is 1926, and the main character, Christine Hoflehner, in her late 20s, works as a lowly postal clerk in a small Austrian village. She has lost her father and her brother...