He'd like to be an "expert in matters of leaving". Absence rules this businessman's life and is destroying his family life. On his son Philipp's birthday he sets out on the long drive home to win back the affections of his child. Filled with fatherly emotion he wants to "make up for 365 neglected days...each one unforgivable".
At the same time John von Düffel tells us the story of Christina, whose existence is dominated by her sister. "I've spent my whole life being compared to you". Christina loses herself and leaves "without good-byes" when her sister Lena dies in an accident. "When children lose their parents they are called orphans, but when they lose each other there is no word for it".
In Time to Leave John von Düffel tells the story of two people whose lives are closing in on them, two life stories which collide dramatically. John von Düffel writes with a wealth of sensitivity about uncertainty and the attempt to assert oneself, of the fear of encounters and the desperate desire for them.
"There is a sentence about every person that can destroy them. No one is allowed to utter it, because it is impossible to take it back, as impossible as it is to overhear it. It destroys immediately". Time to Leave is about the fear of that sentence.