Hanns-Josef Ortheil Die geheimen Stunden der Nacht In the Secret Hours of the Night Luchterhand Literaturverlag, September 2005, 384 pp. ISBN 3-630-87174-7 A struggle of titans in the publishing industry? Many of those involved in the book business might say ‘what’s new’, but that is just the point. This novel, set in Cologne, takes a background with which everyone can feel that he or she is somehow familiar and makes it into a saga that rivets the reader from the first page to the last. As it opens, one Monday morning, 50-year-old Georg Heuken, one of three sons, receives the news that his father, publishing tycoon Reinhard von Heuken, has suffered a second heart attack and is about to breathe his last. So the question for himself and his two siblings is, who will take over the business? He, Georg, is the eldest and least forceful, better at figures than at the nitty-gritty of the trade. His younger brother Christof is more dynamic, but is he ‘solid’? And what about their flakey sister Ursula? The scene is set for battle, and not just within the family. Georg also has to deal with a star author who demands non-stop cosseting, an agent, an editor, and his father’s biographer – all of whom are following events with huge interest and hope to influence the result. As Georg Heuken struggles to hold his own he finds himself sucked into his father’s secret world. For it turns out that the old man had been living a double life in the Kölner Dom Hotel in the years before his heart attack. To find out exactly what has been going on, Georg, married father of two and archetypally bourgeois, installs himself in his father’s old suite. In doing so he discovers within himself capabilities and desires of which he was previously unaware, along with some facts about the family’s past that are almost equally disturbing. This book is quite superb. Using the city and cathedral of Cologne as a backdrop, the author appears to have achieved the impossible feat of pulling together all the great themes of German literature from 1800 to the present day and making them seem new. A memorable achievement.