Michael Kleeberg - Achilles in Taormina

Ernest Hemingway: daredevil, charmer, bon vivant. Undeniably a legend. And at the same time a driven man who constantly had to prove himself, demanding everything from himself and those around him.

With a clever twist, Michael Kleeberg sets out to trace his larger-than-life colleague - and in doing so constructs an identity of his own: as a Hemingway scholar through and through. What turns a boy into a man? What turns a man into a writer? And what turns a writer into an icon? These are the questions that drive the novel's protagonist in his search for Hemingway's "last secret". A gripping game of mirrors between reality and fiction.

Michael Kleeberg studied political science, history and visual communication, working in parallel as a journalist, nurse and dock worker. He lived in Paris for twelve years, and through the writers' exchange programme Westöstlicher Diwan made numerous trips to the Middle East. In 2016 he received the Literary Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for his body of work.