Many of us spend our early years in unconscious flight from our true purpose, only to run smack into it at last, like a fleeing movie heroine who backs around a corner – we know what comes next – and turns abruptly to find herself face to face with her nemesis, or, more often, her deliverance.

No matter what its citizens get up to, Hamburg always manages to keep its nose clean.

Sometimes a voice is there to give you warning, at other times it’s just a voice in the head, alerting you that the landslide’s under way and that your life is changing forever in that instant; the moment you touch a loved one’s face and realize they’re too deeply still for sleep, they’re gone.

Armored against love, for fear of loving too much, and losing.