Young lawyer Alexander Zabel has been pressured by the head of his law practice into defending the indefensible: a lying, power obsessed adulterer and ruthless industrialist accused of wrongfully dismissing his assistant and mistress. She is thirty-four, he seventy-eight, a despot who has always had his way, now wheelchair bound and dying of cancer. Alex must deal with a hopeless case, his growing sympathy for a repulsive client and his sexual attraction to Klofft’s elderly wife.
Less a thriller than an investigative and psychological cliff-hanger, this novel examines how eroticism is somehow amplified by a sense of death approaching and presents insights into the corrosive desire for revenge and the narrowing horizons of old age.
Author Information
Kettenbach is 78 and still writing. He was a somewhat late bloomer: A football journalist at 28, he earned a history and philosophy degree at 36 and published his first novel at 50.
The Translator
Anthea Bell's recent translations include E.T.A. Hoffmann's 'The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr', W.G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz', and Sigmund Freud's 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life'.
Praise for The Stronger Sex
'Kettenbach provides answers that are either darkly humorous or melancholically tragic, depending on how black the reader's heart proves to be...' Booklist
'Most interesting and most readable. It's a bit of Temple, a bit of Hollywood (or even London Boulevard), a bit of Highsmith...' International Noir Fiction
