An exceptional memoir of growing up in northern Germany in the 1930s and of the slide into war. The historian and novelist is warm and humorous as well as observant and meticulous. An unnerv... read more
The stupendous and vaulting 'Symphony of a Thousand', first performed in Munich in 1910 to huge acclaim, and its effect on those around the composer: Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Wal... read more
A love affair and its aftermath, set in the closing years of the GDR. The girl is young, the man significantly older; the alteration in their love finds a parallel in the oppression of the r... read more
When the author makes an impulsive trip to Koenigsberg, her grandmother - after sixty years' silence on the matter - begins to tell her own wartime story. Deeply moving.
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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
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 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
All that remains of the Osnabruk synagogue is a small pile of stones and some chickenwire: a space of oblivion in the German city explored by Cixous, whose Jewish mother came from there.
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
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.
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.
A haunting and complex novel in which a British man discovers that his German grandfather fought on the Eastern Front, from a letter that he leaves on his death.
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
Escape to the West and life in the East through the eyes of a young woman loyal to the GDR: oppression in conflict with idealism. First published in East Germany in 1963.