The Woman with Four Arms

The body of a young man is found lying on the banks of the Ihme river in Hanover. Inline skates on his feet, strangulation marks on his throat, and headphones still blaring in his ears. A case for the brilliant but abrasive Rita Aitzinger and her colleague Ilia Schuster from the homicide squad. Drifting between the opera house, the train station bar and the local burger joint, they quickly find themselves wading through a sea of clues: pop songs, dating app profiles, mysterious tattoos – Rita is convinced that each of them is key to solving the case. Or has she walked into a trap set by a psychopathic murderer? Was Sebastian Tamm not even the first victim? And what does the bashful beat cop Gerd Lampe have to do with it all?

The Woman with Four Arms is a story about depressed boys who are looking for happiness but find death instead. About a city full of bizarre but lovable characters. About rally cars, expensive wine, justice, and police work. Utterly noir, the novel poses the question of whether we can be held responsible for the thoughts of others. And it introduces readers to a version of Hanover that has never existed in reality.

»... not just a chorus of absurd miniatures, but also an emotional geography of an entire region...« David Hugendick

»[The Woman with Four Arms is] a melange that is exciting and new, and one that completely messes with the typical reading habits of contemporary German literature.« Susanne Romanowski, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»When we open a novel … we usually have a pretty clear idea of what awaits us. At the very latest, by the time we’ve read the first few pages, we have a preliminary sketch, like once the corpse has been discovered in an episode of Tatort. And it is very rare that we are forced to fundamentally amend that expectation during the ensuing read. Not the case with Jakob Nolte.« Moritz Baßler, taz.de

»The tone of Nolte’s prose … couples wit and worldliness … and is unparalleled in recent German-language literature.« MDR Kultur

»Jakob Nolte’s unconventional style is one of the most exciting things German literature has to offer.« Rolling Stone