Three Novels, One Question: Who Carries the Responsibility?
Material Value
"An estate is not a life. It is what remains when no one is left to give things back their meaning."
Every month, Vera travels to a fading provincial town in eastern Germany. As an estate appraiser, her job is simple: walk into the homes of the deceased, count the chairs, price the porcelain, and determine the cold, mathematical material value of a life left behind. She has learned not to ask what people truly deserved to leave behind.
But when a routine assessment in a quiet apartment uncovers a hidden bundle of documents, the sterile bureaucracy of the present collides with the heavy, unyielding shadows of the past. Trapped between the rigid paragraphs of the Administrative Rehabilitation Act and the forgotten fates of the East German regime, Vera is forced to confront a history that was supposed to be settled.
Material Value is a haunting, deeply moving exploration of memory, bureaucratic complicity, and the quiet dignity of human lives lost in the machinery of history.
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Residual Debt
Lena Brandt audits the books. She is good at it: patient, exact, immune to the small lies that hide inside a balance sheet. When she is sent to examine a nursing home whose records don't quite add up, she expects the usual — inflated care levels, a missing signature, an administrator who has quietly vanished.
What she doesn't expect is Jonas. A nurse who noticed the same thing she did. Who wrote it down. Who waited for someone to listen. The fraud is the easy part. The harder question is what Lena leaves out of her report — and why. One omission. One name she protects. A narrow gap between what is true and what is written down. There are numbers that are correct, and numbers that are only supposed to be correct. Lena has spent her life learning to tell them apart. Now she has to decide which kind of person she is willing to become — and what she owes, once the audit is closed and the books no longer balance.
A quietly devastating literary crime novel about guilt, trust, and the debts that never appear in any ledger.
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Residual Value
"Starting over has never tasted so sweet—or cost so much."
Katinka is done with the corporate grind. In a bold move to reclaim her life, she buys a derelict, historic butcher shop in a trendy, gentrifying city neighborhood, determined to transform it into the ultimate plant-based bistro. Her mission: to prove that you don't need meat to find the perfect, satisfying umami.
With the help of Paul, the enigmatic former butcher's apprentice who still haunts the property, Katinka's vegan sanctuary begins to thrive. But the neighborhood is a powder keg. Corporate developers are pushing locals out, and a radical young activist named Andy is escalating his protests into dangerous arson.
When Andy secretly uses Katinka's kitchen as a hiding place for his illicit operations, her hard-won dream is suddenly pushed to the brink of ruin. Katinka is an accountant by trade; she knows how to calculate risks, cut losses, and balance the books. She knows that every asset has a residual value. Then, Andy mysteriously vanishes.
And as the police begin to circle the neighborhood, Katinka introduces a spectacular new dish to her menu—a dark, deeply savory seitan goulash with a texture so flawless, her customers can't get enough.
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