Bruno Steiger — the language artist, the architect of an artfully convoluted, enigmatic prose — surprises in Der Billardtisch with a narrative of almost familial intimacy and groundedness in reality. The first-person figure recounts, with surreally amusing obsession for detail, his impossible-to-master life in the multiple roles of artistically ambitious journalist, father and husband in a one-child small family, in a small terraced house in a clearly recognizable residential quarter of Zürich. At the centre of the family stands, of course, the child, Leo, the three-year-old son who drives his excessively loving father into an almost normal small-family madness.