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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
Blaschka père et fils were from Bohemia but moved to Dresden, where they worked in glass from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, making intricate models of sea anemones, medusas, corals and starfi... 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
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
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
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
Focuses on the lives of six individuals and their families who were among the 20 million Germans who never voted for the Nazis. This is an important new assessment of those who had to manage... read more
If you want to read one book about inequality and its ramifications for all societies, now and in the past, let it be this. By a former Pulitzer winner.
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
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...