A childhood in the drizzle of Hamburg’s suburbs. Life moves on, relentless. And somewhere in the middle of it all: Nina. A Life Without Nina is a journey through memory and longing, through home and loss, accompanied by music that lends the story new colors. Some people leave no traces — they leave absences.

Kuala Lumpur, 2013. At the arrivals gate of KLIA 2, a man waits for a woman he has never met in person. And recognizes her immediately. A Life Without Wani is a love story between two worlds — journeys through the fascinating landscapes of Southeast Asia, the inevitable farewells that life far from home brings. And the question of whether some people simply arrive too late. Or whether we are the ones who let them go.

Then came Pei-Chi. A Life Without Pei-Chi is the final movement of a trilogy about what we chase, what we find, and what we can’t hold onto. It asks the question that Nina and Wani both circled, but never answered: What happens when you finally stop running — and she’s still not there?

Ich dicht’ dicht is a collection of poems written across three decades — begun in his teens, and shown to no one until now. Love, longing, loss, and doubt, in rhymes and rhythms that owe a great deal to Heine, gathered from a life lived mostly far from home. They aren’t arranged by theme, because some chapters are easier to carry beside a lighter one.

Her Life in Beijing follows a girl sent out into the world alone before she was old enough to carry her own passport — learning the planet from its airport gates, from Beijing to Moscow to Shanghai. Told in movements, like a piece of music, it is a story of distance, of the farewells that never stop hurting, and of the bubble of silence she learned to disappear into when they came. Through all of it, one thing never leaves her: music. No life without it.

Times in India is the diary of a young law trainee who, with no real plan, follows a friend’s lead and lands in Chennai in 2006 — into the heat, the horns, the chaos, and the unexpected kindness of strangers. Drawn from the blog he kept at the time and told with photographs from the road, it is wide-eyed, funny, and honest about the culture shock of a German abroad for the first time. It is where the long road through Asia began.

Life Lessons is a collection of everything school and university never prepared him for: the values of childhood, the lessons picked up on the job, and the gloriously obscure realities of running a German company in China. Part hard-won insight, part comedy, it gathers the mottos and moments that stuck — and that taught him something, even when he didn’t notice at the time. The absurd title is courtesy of his friend Heiko, to whom the book is dedicated.