Pony Show is a Hamburg legal-and-literary thriller about Mark Steinert, a culture lawyer who becomes dangerously obsessed with his client, Bethany “Betty” Hell, the powerful head of the Lysander publishing house, while defending her against the alleged murder of Fero Lebed, a much younger publishing assistant who has disappeared. It wants to be a courtroom […]
Juras letzter Winter is a self-serious essay-novel about reading, guilt, German violence, fathers, mothers, old age, Ukraine, Leningrad, and the diary of the starving Soviet teenager Jura Rjabinkin. It wants to be morally rigorous, historically alert, intimate, philosophical, and formally daring. Mostly, it is an overextended act of literary self-importance in which a dead boy […]
Afrika is set over the course of forty-eight hours, over ten chapters, as Legation Councillor Gustav von Strinetzky grows increasingly concerned about an upcoming duel he is set to fight. It takes place during the Berlin Conference, where ambassadors have gathered to agree on who is to oversee different parts of Africa. Gustav is pulled […]
Broder is a rural family novel about inheritance, resentment, farming, animal welfare, ageing, suicide, and the terrible pull of the farm even for those who have been pushed away from it. The story is set in North Frisia, in a flat coastal landscape of wet fields, wind, ditches, herons, barns, machines and dying rural traditions. […]
Anton und Alma is a contemporary Berlin love story that gradually becomes a novel about Jewishness, German guilt, inherited trauma, family damage, conversion, antisemitism, the Israel–Gaza war, and the terrifying fact that private love is never protected from history. It follows Anton Weiss, a young Jewish German-American man from Berlin, and Alma Bormann, a non-Jewish […]
Clemens J. Setz’s Mein Leben als Noiseband is a collection about grief, fixation, distorted care, shame, online cruelty, damaged families, and the strange ways people try to make contact with others. The stories often begin in ordinary situations, then bend into obsession, fantasy, horror, or absurdity. “Das Lesebändchen in der U-Bahn” opens with a man […]
The Marianum in Vienna has been one of Austria’s elite boarding schools for as long as anyone can remember. Till Kokorda doesn’t expect much from the school when he starts fifth grade there, but he quickly learns how hard the school can be because of his form teacher, the so-called Dolinar. The Dolinar teaches German […]
This is a postmodern literary novel divided into thirteen numbered chapters, set in 1995 Switzerland. The book’s first-person narrator, called Christian Kracht like the author, is also the main character from Christian Kracht’s debut novel Faserland, and shares many of its topics: road trips, societal decay, Nazi Germany, drug addiction, death. The narrator here bears many similarities to the […]
The novel tells the story of the intense and complex relationship between Hans, a middle-aged novelist, and Katharina, a young woman in East Berlin during the late 1980s. Their relationship begins when they meet on a rainy day, leading to a passionate affair, despite the significant age difference and the fact that Hans is married […]
Martin is a 76-year-old man who learns that he has pancreatic cancer with less than six months to live. He struggles with the idea of telling his wife, Ulla, and their young son, David, about his terminal illness. As he contemplates how to break the news to his family, he reflects on his life, relationships, […]