The Kisses of Thanatos

When your devoutly religious parents choose who you marry, your husband makes all your decisions for you, and your life is accompanied by constant, excruciating pain, then your chances of becoming addicted to drugs are high. This is what happens to Ana, the daughter of a free church pastor. Convinced that marriage is her purpose in life, she agrees to marry Tommy, a devoutly religious doctor, widower and father of three small children. It soon becomes clear that this is a decision with fatal consequences, because Tommy is obsessed with sex. Her four pregnancies, a temporary job, and above all the unbearable headaches offer her respite, at least for a while. She is prescribed increasingly strong medication by her husband, which she becomes addicted to. She is living in hell. When divorce becomes inevitable, a fight ensues between husband and wife for the practice they have established together. Can Ana win and free herself from her addiction? The unsentimental narrative style in which this chilling drama is told gives the extraordinary events even greater force. It is a story that will strike readers to their very core.

Ana Adam was born in 1970 in Wissembourg, France, where her father served as pastor in the Chrischona free church. When she was five years old, the family moved first to Germany, then in 1984 to Switzerland, where Ana graduated from secondary school and completed her training as a nurse. When she was 24 years old, she married a widower with three children, and had four more children of her own. In 2001, she set up a medical practice together with her husband, a doctor. She worked on the management board, was in charge of the team of medical practice assistants and took care of marketing and communication. However, she also suffered from chronic cluster headaches and became increasingly incapacitated. Only after numerous therapies, operations and drug withdrawals was she able to start working again. In 2016 she acquired sole ownership of the practice and expanded the business into a holding with four medical companies. The Kisses of Thanatos is her first book.