The Lockmaster

• Over 1.2 million books sold in Germany
• Sample translation available

Christoph Ransmayr returns with a short tale about killing.  

A longboat plunges down the raging rapids and over the White River’s dreaded cascades. Five people drown. The man who tends the sluice gates, known respectfully in the riverside villages as the ‘lockmaster’, lord of life and death, ought to have prevented this disaster. When the lockmaster subsequently disappears, his son begins to suspect that it wasn’t an accident.

Has this irascible man, so obsessed by the past, turned to murder? The son’s quest for the truth takes him back to long-forgotten days and to his beloved sister. Like his father, he is familiar with the incredible forces of water through his work as a hydraulic engineer on the planet’s great rivers, the focal points of the new water wars. His search takes him across a European continent that has disintegrated into a mosaic of megalomaniac small states.

Christoph Ransmayr has written a consummate, gripping tale about a world on the brink of breakdown, a tale of guilt and forgiveness.

"Candidate of the heart [for the Literature Nobel Prize]" - Frankfurter Rundschau