Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
A powerful novel set in the closing stages of WW2, in which a 12-year-old girl escapes to the German countryside with her mother and older sister. Translated from the German.
Explores the interaction of mass-market diamonds and German colonialism in Africa. Or how the new American fashion for diamond engagement rings funded Germany in two world wars.
The choices made by five women, all of whom experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall in their teens, and now grapple with different kinds of freedom. This has been a huge success in Germany.
It is 30 years since Hazel Holt's biography; many more since David Cecil and Philip Larkin championed her novels. The surprise, perhaps, is that she is read more now than when she first publ... read more
Set in 1943, and first published in German in 1968, this is the story of a young boy torn between loyalties for his father, a police officer, and his friend Max Ludwig Nansen, an Expressioni... read more
Long anticipated voyage through the overlapping currents of nature, life and art. PH won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan, or The Whale; here he attempts to answer why Durer's art endu... read more
As a young man in Germany, AW's grandfather published Kafka and several other depraved authors whose work the Nazis were keen to burn. He fled in 1933, eventually settling in New York where ... read more
1940s rocket-science sci-fi: a Nazi politician is lured into collaborating with the American space programme... what follows is a clever, satirical exploration of morality and technological ... read more
SM's parents were German Jewish refugees; he was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. His maternal aunts concealed their origins too and had very diffe... read more
The fascinating story of a language known as 'Rotwelsch', associated with vagabonds - linked to Yiddish and Romani - that the author learned from his father and uncle. His grandfather, a Naz... read more
As a war photographer and his driver travel through Germany in late 1945, it becomes apparent that they have different reasons for wanting to be there.
On a Greek island in 1977, Calista finds herself working for Billy Wilder on a film. His career is on the wane, and she's a young woman with a lot to learn...
The tale of Cheeseman, a seedy small-time crooner who is bizarrely catapulted to fame by the media machine. First published in 1931, its success caused the author to leave Germany; she died ... read more