Ursula Draesner Spiele Games Luchterhand Literaturverlag, August 2005, 496 pp. ISBN 3-630-87208-5 Early in the morning of 5 September 1972, shortly after the start of the Munich Olympic Games, eight Palestinian terrorists stormed their way into the Israeli Village, killing one athlete and taking nine others hostage, in addition to two bodyguards. In spite of a false report that the hostages had been released, by midnight they and their captors were all dead. This horrific episode, the International Olympic Movement’s darkest hour, is the starting point of this wonderfully atmospheric novel, which brilliantly evokes the Munich of 1972 but moves on from there to other less murderous ‘games’, flashing back and forth as it describes the life of the main character, Katja, a photojournalist now returning, at the age of forty-two, to the city of her childhood and youth after many years of foreign assignments and anxious to answer the question of who she is, what she needs, and how she wishes to live. She also wants to discover what actually happened at the time of the Olympic horror scene and, among other things, why Max, her first love, was sent to the airport with other police officers at the time of the fatal shoot-out, what he did there, and why he joined the police in the first place. Had she, by her treatment of him, somehow goaded him into this? The idea of loss runs through the novel, as does the word Heimat, or ‘homeland’, to which there are frequent references. Katja’s family originally came from Silesia in eastern Germany, but at the end of the Second World War they had to move west and start all over again. So where, really, is ‘home’? Through the author’s skill and assurance in her use of the flashback technique, already displayed in her earlier novel Mitgift (Dowry), she and the reader learn about her past in fragments, and then often obscurely. Little by little, like the layers of an onion, details are peeled off. But this is not a novel that neatly ties up loose ends. Our lives are messy and complicated, love is tender and hurtful, there are no happy endings but, equally, we must not despair. Though the novel is long, one is sad when it comes to an end. This is real literature.