The latest addition to my website is Jurij Koch‘s Der Kirschbaum (The Cherry Tree). This is the first Sorbian novel translated into English. Sorbia is a Slavonic enclave in Germany. (At the time this book was written it was in East Germany). A German engineer, Sieghart, comes to Sorbia with colleagues to look for a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Clemens Meyer‘s Als wir träumten (While We Were Dreaming). This was the first of his novels published in German but the second to be published in English. It follows the lives of a group of boys/young men in the deprived areas of Leipzig, starting shortly before the fall … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ulrike Almut Sandig‘s Monster wie wir (Monsters Like Us). The novel is narrated by Ruth, now a successful violinist to her almost invisible (in this novel) Finnish boyfriend Voitto. Ruth grew up in East Germany where she met Viktor at school and the two became friends. However, they … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wolfgang Hilbig‘s Das Provisorium (The Interim). This novel tells the story of C. He had been a good East German, working in a factory and then, at the age of forty, became a full-time writer. He eventually gets a visa to spend a year in West Germany, leaving … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Wolfgang Hilbig‘s Hilbig: Alte Abdeckerei. This is a short novel, set in what was East Germany, in a fairly remote area. Our unnamed narrator, first as a boy and then as an adult,explores the blighted landscape not far from his home. He discovers a foul-smelling stream but also … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Siegfried Lenz‘s Der Überläufer (The Turncoat). This novel was originally written in 1951, Lenz’s second novel. However, it was not published then, partially for political reasons, and forgotten, only for the manuscript to be found in his papers after his death in 2014. It was published to great … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Francis Nenik‘s Reise durch ein tragikomisches Jahrhundert (Journey Through a Tragicomic Century). The book is a narrative non-fiction. It is the biography of a forgotten German writer, Hasso Grabner (link in German) who had something of a colourful life. He never knew his father, became a Communist early … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Uwe Tellkamp‘s Der Turm (The Tower). This is a monumental novel – around a thousand pages long – which follows the lives of an extended, middle class family in the German Democratic Republic, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tellkamp’s aim is clear – to utterly … Read more