
Five women in love. And then out of it. There aren’t going to be happy endings. Until, the author said, she talked to her daughter, and felt that she had to offer a bit of hope. Because what a lot…
Five women in love. And then out of it. There aren’t going to be happy endings. Until, the author said, she talked to her daughter, and felt that she had to offer a bit of hope. Because what a lot…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. No, not that one, that’s not for a few weeks yet. Advent, the waiting. And who does Advent best? I’ve said it before – the Germans, of course. I haven’t lived in…
Autumn fruit. Pears, apples, grapes… the orchards and vineyards are bursting with golden light. Yet the light is fading. The first frost bites. That’s the English title for you, Tasting Sunlight. But in German, Ewald Arenz called it Alte Sorten,…
A podiatrist’s story. She stopped writing to start looking after other people’s feet. She needed to make a living. Her fellow authors were not impressed. But from that experience, she crafted some impressive portraits of people and place. When many…
Surely, in the sixties, all Germans knew what had happened? Any German you meet in an international context will still, often enough, soon enough, apologise for their existence. Living in Germany in the 2000s, the flags were out for the…
A white, male, comfortably-off, widowed professor at a Berlin university has just retired. He meets Black African men seeking asylum in Europe. He tries to find out about them, and to help them. Not new, perhaps. Isn’t the whole perspective…
It shouldn’t frustrate me so much that a German book has an English title, but it does. This frustration encapsulates some of the struggle for intersectional justice that Emilie Roig exposes. So often concepts and terms are honed in English,…
This book was written on the run. It captures that moment after 9 November 1938 where things got a lot worse for a lot of people, very rapidly. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, then aged 23, had made it out of Germany…
Is this a road trip or a journey back in time? The German and English covers of Töchter/Daughters tell the same story in different ways. Just getting into the car and driving south to get away from it all –…
“People in a hotel” would be a literal translation of Vicki Baum’s groundbreaking novel. It’s nearly a century old now, but when she wrote it, she invented a whole new genre. What sort of people are staying in the hotel?…