Heartstop (Stories)

Heartstop (Stillstand des Herzens) contains three unusual and riveting stories by Martin Grzimek, a highly acclaimed young German writer. In the first, “Heartstop,” a businessman goes to a nightclub to meet his wife’s former lover but instead finds a beautiful, provocative woman. The young wife in “Timestop” would like to rid herself of her husband and does so, but in a way she did not expect. In “Finlandia,” the island in a Finnish lake where a young married couple is spending a solitary vacation turns increasingly sinister. The stories are thematically linked by an atmosphere of unease, of inevitable menace––the seemingly harmless events of everyday life weave themselves into a net in which ordinary people are caught, making time and even hearts stand still.