Five tales of love, kindness, self-interest, despair, and betrayal.

"Only no apple that is ripe remains hanging on the tree, and if nobody shakes it, it falls by itself to the ground. On a summer Sunday's night, Melanie's hour had come."

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933); appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy (1926); and also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

"Stehr is capable as devisor of illuminating the greatness and the secret of creation more than any contemporary and like only a few writers before him." - Ernst Alker