Frankie and Freddie, two brothers from Bremen, in West Berlin in 1980. Whilst one is trying to gain a foothold in Kreuzberg, the other wants to carry on to New York, but for the time being has to serve as a test subject for antidepressants. Now, one day before Christmas Eve, he is afraid of people, can no longer travel on the underground and loses an important bag. In his new novel, Sven Regener sends the two of them through a city caught between fun and coldness, defiance and anarchy, resignation and the will to survive.
Sven Regener was born in Bremen in 1961. After completing his military and community service and spending a year in Hamburg, he moved to Berlin in 1982, where he played the trumpet with the band Zatopek. In 1985, he co-founded the band Element of Crime, with whom he has, to date, released 13 studio albums and played over a thousand concerts as a singer, trumpeter and rhythm guitarist. He has been writing novels since 2001, including "Herr Lehmann" (2001), "Der kleine Bruder" (2008) and "Magical Mystery oder die Rückkehr des Karl Schmidt" (2013). Together with Andreas Dorau, he wrote the latter's biography "Ärger mit der Unsterblichkeit" (2015); with Leander Haußmann, he directed the film "Hai-Alarm am Müggelsee" and wrote the play "Die Danksager / Bunter Abend", which premiered at the Berliner Ensemble on 27 April 2017. His most recent publication is the essay "Between Depression and a Compulsion to Joke: Humour in Literature" (2024). He has also published a collection of blog posts under the title "My Years with Hamburg-Heiner". All his novels have been released as audiobooks, read by the author himself. Sven Regener lives in Berlin; he is married and has two children.