Richard Reich was for many years an editor at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), a columnist for several NZZ publications as well as for other magazines and Swiss radio. In 1999, he founded and became the first director of the Literaturhaus Zürich (Zurich Literature House), and since 2015 he has been co-director of the JULL Young Literature Lab. Richard Reich is also the founder and chairman of the jury for the Over-70s Writing Competition, whose winners spend a week each autumn at the Laudinella Hotel, culminating in a public reading.

Following "Ovoland," "The Garden Center," "Life Is a Gym," "Codeword Laudinella," and "Country Stories," "The Falcon Castle" is Richard Reich's sixth book. The novel is set around 1980 in a venerable newspaper building on Falkenstrasse in Zurich. The titular "Falcon Castle" is a fortress of integrity and a bastion of correct spelling. The deeper the city and the world outside—this being the year of the Zurich youth riots—sink into unrest and lawlessness, the more strictly the people at the Falcon Castle insist on correct grammar and good style. This is especially true when chaos also takes hold within the castle walls: The editor-in-chief has died, department heads are missing, interns from reputable families are disappearing without explanation and have to be replaced at short notice, for example by the enigmatic Vola, who writes acceptably but whom no one really knows and no one wants to hire. Luckily, there's still the Chief Proofreader! In his corner tower, he not only corrects erroneous articles, but also the novel "The Falcon Castle" while you read it…

«"Richard Reich's novel 'The Falcon Castle' is a brilliantly written portrait of the 'old aunt' NZZ newspaper in a time when editors still sat like little kings in private offices, dictating their letters and waiting for the mail to be delivered. It's hard to know what to admire more about the work: the atmospheric density or the well-crafted dialogue, the precise characterization or the slyly comfortable style, the masterful interplay of fact and fiction or the warm humor."‘
Manfred Papst

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