Jesus Christ Kinski’s premise initially seems to be the recreation of a single performance by the prolific and legendarily volatile actor Klaus Kinski. After many years acting in movies (of wildly varying quality) in 1971 Kinski returned to the theatrical stage for a one-man show at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, a monologue entitled Jesus Christus Erlöser ("Jesus Christ the Saviour / Redeemer”). His intense performance rapidly devolved into a kind of battle between Kinski and the audience. The occasion was captured on film and released as a documentary in 2008. In the book’s first part, we are thrown directly into the performance, told in Kinski’s own voice, and moving wildly between reportage of the event itself and Myers’ invention (using words from Kinski’s autobiographies) of what may have been going through his mind.

Good Girl centres on Nila, a 19-year-old student of Afghan refugees living in Berlin in what seems to be around the late 2000s/early 2010s. She has lost her mother and is keen to distance herself from her father, and throws herself into the Berlin clubbing scene, spending long nights and days partying, notably at ‘the Bunker’ (transparently Berghain) where she meets the much older American writer Marlowe, with whom she begins a tempestuous sort-of-relationship based around a mutual affection for art and the consumption of illicit substances.

The Blue Flower is set in the Germany of the late Eighteenth century, as Romantic sensibilities ferment in the great universities and clash with the traditional ways found in the small towns where much of its action takes place. At the centre of the novel is Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Goethe and developing his own ideas and poetry with which he will later find fame as Novalis. The novel’s short chapters provide insights into his unusual and contradictory life (alongside his poetry, he’s also taking on the running of a salt mine…) as well as those of his family members and contemporaries. Most strikingly, it details his captivation by the twelve-year old Sophie von Kuhn, a ‘normal’ girl offering little in terms of the usual expectations of the time (she’s neither financially nor intellectually his equal).