Martin Mosebach Der Nebelfürst (The Prince of Mist) Eichborn, October 2001. 340pp. ISBN 3-8218-4506-6 Purportedly based on a true incident, but in style and telling clearly fictional, this book is the hilarious account of how, at the end of the nineteenth century, an aspiring young journalist named Theodor Lerner, serving his apprenticeship as a reporter on the Berliner Lokalanzeiger, falls into the clutches of a mysterious adventuress and attempts to claim Bear Island, south of Spitzbergen, for himself and the German Empire. Of course Frau Hanhaus has her own financial agenda in setting the scheme up, using her dubious contacts to charter a ship, and inciting Theodor to persuade his editor to send him to the Arctic in search of the balloonist André, who has gone missing in an attempt to fly over the North Pole. Theodor reaches Bear Island, in the company of his crazy crew, but hardly have they claimed possession than their pride of ownership is shattered by the arrival of a Russian cruiser. Bear Island was discovered in 1596 by Willem Barents, the Dutch explorer. But the Russians explain that they now have the next best claim, because Russian Orthodox martyrs were buried there in 1687. Theodor, now known as 'The Prince of Mist', is recalled to Germany, where the press have cottoned on to the fact that no attempt has been made to find the missing balloonist and that the whole expedition was just a cover for a commercial con. He finds Frau Hanhaus in a hotel in Frankfurt, where she is living with her ne'er-do-well son and still hatching up dubious schemes, in which she continues to try to involve him. Enter the shady financier Sholto Douglas, who heartlessly betrays them both, a beautiful black dancer by name Louloubou, and a banker's niece called Ilse, whom Theodor eventually marries. Such is the plot. It fairly sings along, delighting the reader with every twist and turn, and portraying with gentle irony the social world of the German Empire. A humourous tour de force in which the fun is international.