Falling

She plays dying patients for a living. He buries the real ones. One night on a Berlin neurology ward, she makes him laugh, and he hits the floor.

Nele Brinkmann is a stand-up comic from Bielefeld and the best fake patient at the Charité, where she dies for medical students and gets nines. Then, in the middle of her best bit in a Neukölln cellar, she has a real seizure, and wakes up in a hospital bed with cables glued to her head and a diagnosis nobody seems to believe.

In the bed across from her is Anton Fuchs, a fourth-generation undertaker from Pankow. Anton has spent years not laughing, because when he laughs his body switches off and he goes down like a deckchair, wide awake. At two in the morning, Nele tells him a joke.

What follows is a winter of warnings and soft landings: a first date among the coffins, a hearse parked outside a comedy club, Christmas on two floors three hundred and eighty kilometres apart. Then Nele writes the funniest thing she has ever written, and it is about him. And Anton asked her for only one thing.

Falling is a warm, funny, honest love story about functional seizures and narcolepsy, about Berlin's comedy basements and a funeral home that has been open since 1911, and about learning to ask the people you love twice.

Book Two of The Ward. Every book in the series is a complete love story with its own couple and its own ending. Mira and Jonas from Wired make an appearance.