What We Are Made Of Book

One of the most outstanding voices in German literary fiction delivers a powerful and cinematic literary thriller in the vein of David Lynch, exploring post-9/11 America from NYC to Marfa, Texas

It is early September 2002 and Niklas Kalf, a German writer, is in New York for the first time. He has just published a biography of a Jewish-German physicist named Eugen Meerkaz, who emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1930s. Niklas is accompanied by his wife Liz, who is several months pregnant. The hot New York City summer and the first anniversary of the World Trade Center catastrophe weigh heavily on the city. Their third day there, Liz is kidnapped. In return for her release her anonymous captor demands information on secret experiments that Meerkaz has supposedly conducted—information Niklas does not have. In desperation, he reexamines every fact about the scientist and every document in his possession and comes up with one faint lead—a letter addressed to Meerkaz’s widow Elsa by a German soldier and postmarked in Marfa, Texas. Niklas embarks on a tumultuous journey to this reclusive part of Texas, where he discovers secret links to an occultist group. Fearless, the young writer digs deeper and deeper, but nothing can prepare him for what he is going to find and the real identity of his enemies—who know no mercy.