You see them on the news, staggering towards the camera, the innocent caught up in any conflict. Bewildered, covered in blood. But what happens years later, long after the headlines have faded into obscurity?

Karl Dresner is one such victim. There's a gloss of success about him, an East Berliner made good after the Wall came down. Until he makes one bad decision.

He should be on a plane to the Maldives with a girlfriend who wants more than he can give. But, for Karl, work comes first and he pays the price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He's cut down in a blizzard of glass shards: alive, but only just.

The doctors can perform miracles repairing the scars on the outside, but it's a different man who returns home to Munich. To a vacuum. Girlfriend gone. Friends, who can't begin to understand, now seem like strangers from another, safer, world. He sinks into a solitary abyss, punctuated by empty sexual encounters.

A shadow of a man barely connected with the world of the living, he remains a broken empty shell until he meets Lucia Cavallieri. Impulsive, life-affirming, almost too strong-willed for her own good, she can see a future in him that he cannot see himself. Can she repair the damage? Or is there no hope when a life's been ripped apart?

From a car bomb in London to a riot in Berlin, 'Scars Beneath The Skin' reflects the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, a dark psychological story about finding love at the point of suicide.