I was a keen reader of German writer Judith Hermann a little while back, loving her cool, distanced tone and elegant sentences. After a little gap since Letti Park, she’s come back into my life, through the excerpt of Wir hätten uns alles gesagt in the Granta 165 Deutschland collection, translated by Katy Derbyshire, and then through Tony’s Reading List, where he reviewed her novel Daheim.  I was so taken by the Granta excerpt that I decided to read the book in its entirety, originally conceived as a series of lectures on poetics. The book is indeed about writing, and the connections bet ..read more

The writer Shida Bazyar told us at the recent Goethe Institut event that Sisters in Arms, longlisted for the German Book Prize 2021, was partly inspired by Erich Maria Remarque’s book Three Comrades. She’d been intrigued by the pull of the ‘buddy’ novel that seemed to fascinate men, and wanted to explore what a novel about female friendship would look like. The novel tells the story of Saya, Kasih and Hani who grew up together in Germany, and who’ve come together once more to celebrate a friend’s wedding. We, the readers, are straightaway pulled into their world by a text prefacing the novel ..read more

Since hearing Lutz Seiler read at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival last year, I’ve been keen to learn more about his home state of Thüringen in the former GDR, and in particular the uranium mines that dominated the landscape and lives of so many people there. The essay collection In Case of Loss is illuminating on this, as well as on Lutz Seiler’s own family and upbringing: he looks back at his past, on memory, change and transformation. But across the individual pieces it’s also an account of his development as a poet. He discusses the work of German poets Peter Huchel and Jürgen Becker, an ..read more

It’s been such a pleasure to end the year reading this superb Granta collection. The writing includes fiction, auto-fiction, essays on culture and politics, poetry and journalism. It’s not just a collection of written pieces: there are also three series of photographs, each with an excellent introduction, and an essay on painter Neo Rauch together with several colour reproductions of his work. Several top translators have been engaged in the project: Katy Derbyshire, Ruth Martin, Karen Leeder, Michael Hofmann, Shaun Whiteside, to name but a few. And though many texts refer to historical and cu ..read more

This novel by Austrian writer Caroline Schutti won the European Prize for Literature 2015 and has just now been published in English translation. It’s the story of Maja, brought up by a taciturn great-aunt in a rural village in some non-specified European country, a girl who has lost her mother and her mother tongue, and feels permanently ill at ease and not at home. We first meet her playing with her Russian dolls, those intriguing dolls of diminishing sizes that fit one inside the other. She’s always called them her Babushka, though the great-aunt corrects her, saying they’re her Matryoshka ..read more

What a pleasure to reconnect with the world of Monika Helfer and die Bagage- the riff-raff. Löwenherz, Lionheart, is the final novel in Monika Helfer’s family story. The trilogy starts, in die Bagage, with her grandmother, then goes on to her father’s story in Vati, which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2021. Here, in Löwenherz, we have the story of Richard, the writer’s brother.  Though this novel is in some ways slighter than the first two—fewer characters, a narrower focus—it’s equally moving. We learn on the second page that Richard took his own life at the age of thirty, so ..read more

The real conversation in Berlin is about East and West. I was intrigued to hear this comment from American writer Lorrie Moore on the podcast Literary Friction in July. She was recommending Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, and her words have been going round in my head ever since. I’ve been thinking back to my last visit to Berlin in September 2022 where I spent time with an old uni friend. Sure, we marvelled at ourselves sitting in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, when as students in the Cold War we never thought we’d see the workplace of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel. Yes, we loved the ren ..read more

I was lucky enough to hear Lutz Seiler in conversation with Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories and Professor Adam Piette at Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Literary Festival this last October. Having read and admired Lutz Seiler’s first novel, Kruso, I was keen to read Star 111, his second novel, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2020. I seem to be having a moment with German novels about the Wende—the process of communist East Germany collapsing and the reunification of East and West. This novel certainly falls into the Wenderoman genre, but it’s also a Bildungsroman, a Coming-of-Age novel ..read more

Julia Franck is best known amongst English readers for her novel The Blind Side of the Heart, a moving family story set during the Second World War. This time, in Worlds Apart, she’s writing about her own life, though she explains at the start that her version of events, her take on family members, is subjective and will be totally different—worlds apart—from that of anyone else. Though the narrative is broadly chronological, she loops back and forth between events and personalities, just touching on something to begin with, to go back to in more detail later on. As much of her childhood is f ..read more

I’m a great fan of German writer Jenny Erpenbeck. With novels like The End of Days and Go, Went, Gone, and her non-fiction collection Not a Novel, she’s acquired for me the status of public intellectual, a sort of German equivalent of our English-speaking novelist and thinker Zadie Smith. Her most recent novel, Kairos, is set in the dying days of communist East Germany, and shows its characters caught up in the maelstrom of history. Yet it’s a love story too, with all the intimacy and romantic intensity of that genre—what reader is not drawn in by the idea of Kairos, the Greek idea of the spec ..read more