Books That Travel 2022

Best known now for her involvement with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) first became famous for fiction and...

Best known now for her involvement with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) first became famous for fiction and criticism that engaged provocatively with

”the woman question.“ In Anneliese‘s House, the protagonist is Anneliese Branhardt, who long ago renounced a career as a pianist to raise a family with her physician husband, Frank. She worries about her son Balduin

and about her equally free-spirited daughter Gitta. She is haunted by memories of a daughter who died in childhood and anxious about a risky, late pregnancy. With her domestic harmony threatened by her own stirrings of autonomy and her children‘s growing independence, Anneliese finds the future both frightening and promising

Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding...

Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what’s going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan’s book is a big hitter in Germany – and now it’s coming home to roost.

Berlin, November 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silberman must flee out the back of his own...

Berlin, November 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silberman must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-yearold Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The

Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace.

Skalde writes her thoughts on piecesof paper, making new discoveries and revelations, and finding scraps with which to understand her...

Skalde writes her thoughts on piecesof paper, making new discoveries and revelations, and finding scraps with which to understand her limited world. Her mother Edith tells her little, preferring the solitude of her room. Their house is full of silence, and secrets. Skalde has only ever known life with her mother. When a girl called Meisis arrives, from where no one knows, Skalde goes against Edith’s wishes by bringing her in. Meisis’s arrival means there has been a serious breach in security for the area. Beautifully written in immersive, spare prose, Helene Bukowski’s debut novel is about what it means to be a mother at the end of the world, about living with the impacts of climate change, and the way we view “outsiders.”

When her parents die in a car accident, Austrian physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with a problem. Her parents’ will...

When her parents die in a car accident, Austrian physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with a problem. Her parents’ will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home — but for strangers, the village of Gross-Einland remains hidden from view. When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that exerts a strange control over the lives of the villagers. Nobody wants to talk about it — not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy. Edelbauer’s tale of trauma and history weaves an dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory.

Twelve Nights transports us to the wintry depths of Europe‘s Black Forest, through the stillness of the snow-covered hills, the...

Twelve Nights transports us to the wintry depths of Europe‘s Black Forest, through the stillness of the snow-covered hills, the dense woods, the cold and mist, in those dark, wild days between Christmas and Epiphany. These nights are a time of tradition and superstition, of tales told around the local innkeeper‘s table of marauding spirits, as tangible as the ghosts of Manfred‘s past. But the twelfth night, Epiphany, promises new beginnings, and a hope of reconciliation at last.

Every year, on average 23 people disappear without a trace from cruise ships. No one has ever come back. Until...

Every year, on average 23 people disappear without a trace from cruise ships. No one has ever come back. Until now. Five years ago police psychologist Martin Schwartz lost his wife and son. They were holidaying on a cruise ship when they simply vanished, the case written off as a straightforward murder-suicide. They are not the only parent-and-child pair to have disappeared from the ship in recent years – and yet, the authorities seem unconcerned. But when a missing girl reappears – carrying Martin‘s son‘s beloved teddy bear – the police won‘t be able to avoid the truth that something sinister is lurking on board ..

Each of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it’s the crimes of the...

Each of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it’s the crimes of the Naziera, which have hurt him for as long as he can remember. That’s why he became an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management. For his best friend, Graziela, that past was also her focal point – until she met a man who desired her. Hans and Graziela thought the Nazi crimes were the inheritance that neither could bear, but can we really blame Nazism for everything? Iris Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their clutches to this day, and the absurdities to which institutionalising commemoration leads. Can a country manage its past, or ought we to remain helpless in the face of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust?

This absorbing novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a...

This absorbing novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a summer resort outside of Salzburg that he visited as a child. But where he once thrilled to the joys of youth, he now feels unproductive and uninspired, adrift in the modern world. Over ten days in 1924 in a ramshackle inn that has been renamed the Grand Hotel, Hofmannsthal fruitlessly attempts to complete a play he’s long been wrestling with, plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure. Palace of Flies conjures up an individual state of distress and disruption at a time of fundamental societal transformation that speaks eloquently to our own age

Love in Five Acts is a suite of hard-hitting stories of five women who attempt the impossible — to love,...

Love in Five Acts is a suite of hard-hitting stories of five women who attempt the impossible — to love, to be strong, and to stay true to themselves. Paula, Judith, Brida, Malika and Jorinde: five women whose paths coincide. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin wall, when freedom replaced borders and restrictions. But freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice. A novel that speaks to women‘s experiences, it explores what remains of these women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters, and daughters. Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

On a beautiful spring day, a small village in Western Germany wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of...

On a beautiful spring day, a small village in Western Germany wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of an okapi. Someone is about to die. But who? As the residents of the village begin acting strangely, Selma‘s granddaughter Luise looks on as the imminent threat brings long carried secrets to the surface. And when death comes, it comes in a way none of them could have predicted ... A story about the absurdity of life and death, a bittersweet portrait of village life and the wider world that beckons beyond, What You Can See from Here is a story about the way loss and love shape not just a person, but a community.

Riva is a ”high-rise diver,“ a top athlete with millions of fans, and a perfectly functioning human on all levels....

Riva is a ”high-rise diver,“ a top athlete with millions of fans, and a perfectly functioning human on all levels. Suddenly she rebels, breaking her contract and refusing to train. Cameras are everywhere in her world, but she doesn‘t know her every move is being watched by Hitomi, the psychologist tasked with reining Riva back in. Unquestionably loyal to the system, Hitomi‘s own life is at stake: should she fail to deliver, she will be banned to the ”peripheries,“ the filthy outskirts of society. For readers of The Handmaid‘s Tale, The Circle, and Brave New World, this chilling dystopia constructs a world uncomfortably close to our own, in which performance is everything.

Told with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who...

Told with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother’s early death. Ever close to her loving father, Gül grows into a warm-hearted, hard-working young woman. The Blacksmith’s Daughter is a novel full of carefree summers and hard winters, old wives’ tales and young people’s ambitions – the melancholy beauty and pain of an ordinary life.

Olga is an orphan raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart...

Olga is an orphan raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart and precocious, she fights against the prejudices of the time to find her place in a world that sees her as second-best. When she falls in love with Herbert, a local aristocrat obsessed with the era’s dreams of power, glory and greatness, her life is irremediably changed. Their love, entwined with the twisting paths of German history, leads us from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west. This is the story of that love – told in thought, letters and in a fateful moment of great rebellion

From their graves in the field, the oldest part of Paulstadt’s cemetery, the town’s late inhabitants tell stories from their...

From their graves in the field, the oldest part of Paulstadt’s cemetery, the town’s late inhabitants tell stories from their lives. Some recall just a moment, perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one that they now realize shaped their life forever. Some remember all the people they’ve been with, or the only person they ever loved. These voices together – young, old, rich poor – build a picture of a community, as viewed from below ground instead of from above. The streets of the small, sleepy provincial town of Paulstadt are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned and died there.

Saša Stanišic‘s Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that...

Saša Stanišic‘s Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Stanišic traces a family‘s escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a life in Germany. As he explores what it means to be European today, he examines how it feels to learn a new language, to find new friends, and to build an identity between countries and cultures. A book about homelands, both remembered and imagined, that explores the questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival, and what role our origins and memories play in our lives.

October 16, 1943, as darkness descends upon the Vatican. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up Rome’s...

October 16, 1943, as darkness descends upon the Vatican. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up Rome’s Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the offer of refuge. Pollak’s visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts his life story. Torn between hearing Pollak’s tale and his mission, the Vatican’s messenger presses him to depart. This stunning novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.

Lanzarote on New Year’s Day: Henning is cycling up the path to Femés. As he struggles against the wind and...

Lanzarote on New Year’s Day: Henning is cycling up the path to Femés. As he struggles against the wind and the gradient he takes stock of his life. He has a job, a wife, two children — yet hardly recognizes himself anymore. When he finally reaches the pass in utter exhaustion, a mysterious coincidence unveils a repressed memory, plunging him back into childhood and the traumatic event that almost cost him and his sister their lives. In this compelling and darkly psychological novel, Juli Zeh tells the story of two children who, in the middle of a holiday in paradise, end up in hell and live to tell the tale.