Heaven’s not a Place

After his highly acclaimed bestseller “Der Liebeswunsch” and the collection of moving short stories “Das normale Leben”, 83-year-old Dieter Wellershoff proves once again that he is a master of understanding emotions and calling into question habits and certainties.

The novel begins like a detective story and develops into a richly populated social drama. The protagonist is a young rural priest who one night is called to the scene of an accident. A car has veered off the road and ended up in a lake. The driver has managed to save himself, but his wife and son are killed. It’s not clear how this could have happened. The alleged accident soon takes on sinister qualities. However, the priest is convinced of the man’s innocence but faces the opposition of almost the entire parish.
This is the start of a growing identity crisis. It affects his religious convictions just as it affects friendships and his relationship to a woman he meets at a wedding party and who, at a time when the priest is feeling increasingly vulnerable, appears as an indistinct promise.

With a fine feel for moods and feelings, Dieter Wellershoff describes how a man, who has lived with the certainty that his life has a meaningful order, comes up against limits – his own personal limits and those of an institution that claims to offer orientation and safety. The scenic tension of this process of self-doubt, the multitude of voices of the characters involved in it and the subtle portrayal of a person who eventually realises he is standing on precarious ground – all this makes for an extraordinary reading experience.