While cruising one evening by Teufelssee, a small glacial lake in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin, a man spots a handsome stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to his former lover. Only, Lukas died nearly thirty years ago. Yet the man cannot shake the feeling that it was really Lukas he saw. As the man spends a long, hot summer by the lake, he continues to encounter Lukas, and then other lost lovers as well. As he attempts to make sense of the strange occurrences and learns more of Teufelssee, he finds himself venturing deeper into the mystery of the forest, leading him to question not just his sanity but the nature of time itself.
Slim but astonishing ... Those expecting the novel to replicate that show’s raunchy titillation will instead find in The Living Realm a far more elegiac, meditative work. Tannahill writes as gorgeously about nature...as he does about bodies ... Extraordinary and sensitive.
Our narrator...doesn’t have a name, which is economical since he doesn’t have a personality either ... In non-professional circles, this is what’s known as padding, and The Living Realm has more of it than a furniture showroom. This is a dead giveaway that a novel should have been a short story, and it’s hardly saved by our narrator’s eventual inner crisis, when he decides to surrender himself to whatever the heck is going on in the woods:
