The easy life

Jan and Kathrin once had it all, their easy life let them float through a world that was above all kind to the beautiful couple. But this state has been lost to them. The world around them is changing too fast and they themselves feel only stagnation, trapped in the conventions of marriage and bourgeois life. Kathrin used to be a hyped writer, now she ekes out an existence as a substitute teacher and tries to feel herself again at a sex party. Jan, a famous TV journalist, is plagued by an anonymous blackmailer who sends nude photos of him as a boarding school student. While her husband panics that his terrible secret might come to light, Kathrin, of all people, covets her daughter's beautiful and mysterious boyfriend Lale, who is also her student.After his great autofictional novel Die Welt im Rücken, which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and translated into 22 languages, Thomas Melle's Das leichte Leben (The Easy Life) is a literary survey of a society driven by longing, precisely for the easy life.