Completely Kafka by Nicolas Mahler
Translated by Alexander Booth Review by Karen Langley 2024 is the centenary of the death of author Franz Kafka and the year has seen a flurry of interest focusing on…
Shiny Prize Season – Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck – International Booker Prize
Translated by Michael Hofmann Review by Susan Osborne Jenny Erpenbeck’s novels offer much food for thought on the events that have shaped modern Germany. Opening in 1986, Kairos charts an…
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
Translated by Anthea Bell Review by Terence Jagger Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna, but lived in England, the USA and Brazil, where he apparently died in a double suicide…
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Translated by Hilda Rosner Reviewed by Harriet Siddhartha had one single goal – to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow – to let the…
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Translated by Ralph Manheim, illustrated by Marie-Alice Harel Review by Lory Widmer Hess He picked up the book and examined it from all sides. It was bound in copper-colored silk,…
Clouds over Paris: The Wartime Notebooks of Felix Hartlaub
Translated by Simon Beattie Review by Karen Langley Felix Hartlaub is a name relatively unknown in the English-speaking world: the son of an art historian/museum director who fell foul of…
On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt by Ann Heberlein
Translated by Alice Menzies Review by Karen Langley The concept of “the banality of evil”, coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt, has become famous (some might say notorious) since she developed…
The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
Translated by Philip Boehm Reviewed by Gill Davies This is an important republication of a novel which first appeared eighty years ago under a pen name and in translation as…
Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz
Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of her books featuring the Hamburg-based State…
Daughters by Lucy Fricke
Translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff In the Translator’s Note at the end of Daughters, Sinéad Crowe writes of her concern about successfully translating the…
Journey through a Tragicomic Century: The Absurd Life of Hasso Grabner by Francis Nenik
Translated by Katy Derbyshire Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff This September sees the launch of V&Q Books, a brand-new publishing imprint with the mission of translating ‘remarkable writing from Germany’ for…
The Day My Grandfather Was a Hero by Paulus Hochgatterer
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff By day, Paulus Hochgatterer is a child psychiatrist – something that absolutely shows in his writing. The Austrian author’s…
The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun
Translated by Kathie von Ankum Reviewed by Harriet If a young woman from money marries an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for…
The Second Rider by Alex Beer
Translated by Tim Mohr Review by Gill Davies The Second Rider is the first novel in a projected new series by the Austrian writer, Alex Beer. It is set in…
The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers
Translated by Margaret Bettauer Dembo Reviewed by Gill Davies The novel is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and was first published in German in 1942. Seghers was a…
Zen and the Art of Murder by Oliver Bottini
Translated by Jamie Bulloch Reviewed by Terence Jagger We are not in Japan, but Germany; set in the snowy Black Forest, not far from the French border, this novel starts…
The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe by Franziska zu Reventlow
Translated by James J. Conway Reviewed by Lizzy Siddal Countess Franziska zu Reventlow was born into the German nobility, and lived in the castle at Husum in Schleswig-Holstein, where none other…
Demian by Hermann Hesse
Translated by W. J. Strachan Reviewed by Karen Langley Is it the destiny of mankind to be pulled constantly back and forth between the two poles of good and evil,…
Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel
Translated by Amanda DeMarco Reviewed by Rob Spence Berlin is one of my favourite cities, and I have spent a lot of time walking around its fascinating streets. So the…
Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano
Translated by John Brownjohn Reviewed by Annabel I’m very glad to have met the irrepressible Auntie Poldi! Our narrator, her beloved nephew, tells us what she is like: a glamorous…
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada
Translated by Susan Bernofsky Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a rather engaging book, which on the surface is not entirely innocent of the grave crime of being cute, but…
The Pledge, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Translated by Joel Agee Reviewed by Eleanor Franzén In a mountainous Swiss canton not far from Zurich, a little girl’s body is found. She is only seven or eight, with…
The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler
Translated by Charlotte Collins Reviewed by Susan Osborne It’s a both a joy and a worry when a second novel appears on the horizon following one quite so spectacularly good…
Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Translated by Basil Creighton / revised by Margot Bettauer Dembo Reviewed by Karen Langley Being known as the author of one successful book can be as much of a curse…
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