Rain - Karen Duve

"It will get better when it stops raining," said Leon. When Leon Ulbricht lands a contract to write a gangster's memoirs and moves into his dream home in an East German village with his beautiful wife Martina, everything seems set for an idyllic existence.

But the dream home turns out to be in the middle of a fetid swamp; his house and marriage are falling apart; he can't write the book and has spent all of his advance. It rains without end and their attempts to repair the house, or at least dry it out, are hampered by the plague of slugs eating away at the foundations. And then the gangster, wondering why his memoirs are not yet completed, decides to get nasty