A collection of four marginally related novellas, each dealing in some way with the liver. For all the different approaches, though, the tone throughout tends to be one of alcoholism and excess in the modern world, junkies and grubby grotesqueries. Not a particularly pleasant read, and not that interesting either to be honest - it's just so enormously overwrought that wading through all that desperate prose soon becomes plain tedious. With one exception: "Leberknodel". In this, the second of the novellas - and the only one where the prose is so restrained that the narrative becomes cuttingly observant - an elderly woman called Joyce, suffering from liver cancer, takes herself to Switzerland for euthanasia. Except her cancer seems to suddenly be in abeyance, a miracle cure, and Joyce is left in limbo... It's the only story here I enjoyed. On it's own it'd get three stars from me, but as it is "Leberknodel" isn't sufficient to compensate for its companion novellas.