This regular page brings you a selection of German-language titles that have just been, or are soon to be, published in English. We cover fiction , crime, nonfiction, children’s and YA, short stories, poetry and essays.
Clicking the ‘Enjoy in English’ tag above or here will bring up older editions of this page.
Fiction
Translated by Tess Lewis
Seagull Books, September 2025
Set against the backdrop of escalating environmental collapse, this novel is a timely exploration of the terrifying consequences of climate change—particularly wildfires.
A feverish and unsettling meditation on climate collapse, Arson is told through the fragmented perspectives of two individuals struggling to make sense of a world consumed by fire. An unnamed narrator, a writer plagued by anxiety and writer’s block, watches as the planet, her relationships, and even her ability to dream are ravaged by environmental disaster. Meanwhile, an insomniac scientist, obsessed with tracking wildfires, clings to data as his last grip on control, meticulously recording every flame that devours the forests.
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
Prototype, February 2025
Read our interview with Prototype here.
In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.
A generous and perceptive gathering of kaleidoscopic observations on landscape and the languages that echo through them.
Nancy Campbell
The Lack of Light by Nino Haratishvili
Translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
Harper Via, September 2025 (USA) and HarperCollins, October 2025
A page-turning epic of loss and redemption in the vein of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, about a group of four women who formed a deep friendship in the turbulent years leading up to and after Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union.
Like the International Booker Prize nominated The Eighth Life before it, Nino Haratischwili’s The Lack of Light is an emotionally bold, decades-spanning epic in which to lose yourself, brought to life by the vibrant colours of Georgia’s culture and its people. It is a glorious book readers will return to again and again.
Blood Book // Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues by Kim de l’Horizon
Translated by Jamie Lee Searle
Published as Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and as Blood Book in the UK with Sceptre, August 2025
Winner of the German Book Prize, the Swiss Book Prize, and the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize
A prizewinning, boundary-breaking debut exploring family, class, history, and the true idea of the self.
A quest toward understanding, a story of liberation—from generational trauma, gender constructs, class identity, the limits of language—this narrative invents its own forms, words, and bodies to conjure and cast out the very idea of the unspeakable. It searches for other kinds of knowledge and traditions, other ways of becoming, and reaches for wisdom beyond the human. In their award-winning debut, Kim de l’Horizon reimagines family narratives, abandoning the linear in favour of a fluid, incantatory, expansive search into who we are.
Read an excerpt on Literary Hub
Read Jamie Lee Searle’s reflections on translating this work here
All The Lights by Clemens Meyer
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
And Other Stories, July 2025
A new 2025 edition of All the Lights in the And Other Stories series design.
Stories about people who have lost out in life and in love, and about their hopes for one really big win, the chance to make something of their lives. In silent apartments, desolate warehouses, prisons and by the river, Meyer strikes the tone of our harsh times, and finds the grace notes, the bright lights shining in the dark.
The Trembling World by Tanja Paar
Translated by Eleanor Updegraff
Paradoxum, May 2025
The Trembling World, the first of Tanja Paar’s works to appear in English, tells the story of an Austrian family in Anatolia at the turn of the 20th century, whose fate is shaped by war, displacement, and questions of identity. Spanning continents, it is a moving exploration of family bonds, survival, and the haunting legacies of choice.
Read our original recommendation here.
Read our interview with author Tanja Paar here.
Woman in the Pillory by Brigitte Reimann
Translated by Lucy Jones
Penguin Modern Classics, November 2025
Kathrin – five years into a disenchanting marriage – struggles to work the farm with her sister-in-law while her husband Heinrich is away fighting for the Third Reich. To help them with the harvest, Heinrich arranges for Alexei, a Russian prisoner of war, to labour in the fields. Though initially suspicious of this watchful stranger, Kathrin is soon drawn to Alexei, with ruinous consequences.
First published in 1956, Woman in the Pillory is a formative novella by one of East Germany’s most significant writers, showcasing Brigitte Reimann’s vivid ideological engagement with the legacy of Nazi Germany and the Communist drive to create ‘a new kind of person’ following the devastation of the war.
SMALLTOWNNOVELLA by Ronald M. Schernikau
Translated by Lucy Jones
Ugly Duckling Presse, November 2025
A classic of the queer German canon, Schernikau’s 1980 KLEINSTADTNOVELLE follows b, a teenage, working-class communist who falls in love with leif, a popular jock. When leif becomes fearful of the consequences of their affair, he instigates a community-wide assault. Written in a brilliant, all-lowercase, stream-of-consciousness, Schernikau’s novella is a radical reimagining of the German Bildungsroman.
Translated by Tess Lewis
Seagull Books, August 2025
A hauntingly beautiful debut novel that interweaves grief, memory, and the mystical realm of an ancient forest through eighty-four poignant vignettes.
The Romansh poet Leta Semadeni’s first novel, Tamangur, is a gem with many facets. This childhood idyll in a remote alpine valley full of shadows throbs with a dark undercurrent of loss. Tamangur is an old stone pine forest in the Engadin but in this book it is also a mysterious realm of the dead, a kind of Valhalla for hunters and their families.
Read our original recommendation here.
Translated by Caroline Waight
Héloïse Press, September 2025
From the creative duo who gave us What Concerns Us, this new novel explores non-monogamous relationships and shifting identities through the voices of three women, brought together in the quiet tension of the Swiss mountains. Told in alternating voices, Woman, Idle explores two main questions: What kind of women have I become? What kind of women do I want to be?
Translated by Neil Blackadder
The Indigo Press, November 2025
Anne Weber traces the contradictions and crises, the reckonings and departures of her great-grandfather by deciphering his letters and diaries, and travelling in his footsteps to Poland. Through the thicket of time and research, complex questions arise: how do you live with a history that you can’t escape? What did it mean to be German one hundred years ago? And what is it like today?
With literary and philosophical references including Sontag, Sebald and Nietzsche, Weber combines her family history with a broader examination of ethics and morality to create a travel diary through time, reaching back to understand her ancestors.
Translated by Ruth Martin
Moth Books, June 2025
In the rural Banat, a young wife fearing for her unborn child takes a cart ride through all-enveloping snow. That child, Samuel, grows up under the brutal Ceausescu regime in Romania, where language masks truth and even minor acts have repercussions.
What happens when one leaves, but others must stay behind?
Compact and vivid, this powerful novel of migration, identity and loss is deeply informed by the fall of the Eastern bloc and by Iris Wolff’s own family history in Transylvania.
Read our original recommendation here.
Mediated smoothly by Ruth Martin in translation, Iris Wolff proves to be a superlative storyteller. Shuttling between several temporal planes, combining lyrical passages with precise, almost clinical descriptions, and navigating between striking flashbacks and digressions of all kinds, she is a master of the teasingly slow dramatic build-up. The result is memorable prose, subtle and mesmerizing. Herta Müller is no longer alone in Germany.
TLS
This novel, with the breadth of an epic and the lightness of touch of a fairytale, is a pocket history of 20th-century Romania…The style is equally comfortable with cultural history (when a child dies, windows are opened, chairs upturned: “death must not feel at home here again too soon”), an action-packed escape in a crop-dusting plane or ironic commentary on the Ceausescu regime. “He loved his people so much […] he shielded [them] from pride by preventing them from having their own opinions.” All in all, the lives in this compact marvel of a book are presented “so vividly you think you remember them yourself”.
The Guardian
The Class Reunion by Franz Werfel
Translated by Bernhard Rest
Eglantyne Books, September 2025
The novel, set in 1927 Prague, follows the twenty-fifth reunion of the Class of 1902 from the prestigious Stephansgymnasium, portraying characters closely based on real people. Its 1928 publication caused a scandal for its sharp psychological insights and recognizable depictions, cementing Franz Werfel’s notoriety.
Nonfiction
Translated by Elisbaeth Lauffer
New Vessel Press, February 2025
How do power and beauty join forces to determine who is considered ugly? What role does that ugliness play in fomenting hatred? Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan-born author and artist who lives in Germany, has written a touching, intimate, and highly political book.
With a profound mix of essay, poetry, her own drawings, and cultural and social history of the body, Hilal explores notions of repulsion and attraction, taking the reader into the most personal of realms to put self-image to the test. Why are we afraid of ugliness?
A sweeping meditation on a subject rarely addressed . . . Hilal takes on our beauty-worshipping celebrity culture and the beauty industry for . . . keeping women in an expensive prison of self-doubt . . . Ugliness makes a ‘big picture’ argument, panning outward from one young woman’s life to some of the largest issues we confront globally—hence to all of our lives.
Rhonda Garelick in The New York Times
If Russia Wins A Scenario by Carlo Masala
Translated by Olena Ebel and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
Atlantic Books, August 2025
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
March 2028: Russian troops capture the small Estonian town of Narva and the island of Hiiumaa in the Baltic Sea. After victory in Ukraine, Putin’s long-mooted encroachment into the Baltic states has begun. Europe’s slow rearmament and its compromised military and intelligence capabilities is now clear for its enemies to exploit. Does Article 5 of NATO apply? What will the alliance decide? Will they risk nuclear war?
In If Russia Wins, military expert and Professor of International Relations at the University of Munich, Carlo Masala explores these questions and underlines what is at stake in Ukraine in the starkest possible terms.
Climate Injustice by Friederike Otto
Translated by Sarah Pybus
Greystone Books, April 2025
In Climate Injustice, Friederike Otto reveals how extreme weather disproportionately harms the world’s most vulnerable populations, despite their minimal contribution to climate change. Using real-world events and stories, she exposes the links between inequality, colonialism, and environmental crises, urging systemic change to address these intertwined injustices.
Fateful Hours The Collapse of the Weimar Republic by Volker Ullrich
Translated by Jefferson Chase
Pushkin Press, October 2025
Fateful Hours is a timely and grippingly immersive book about how democracy died in the Weimar Republic from celebrated historian Volker Ullrich.
Generation GDR: Truth, Freedom and One Man’s Last Journey by Peter Wensierski
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
MacLehose Press, August 2025
A gripping account of East Germany in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and of one man’s fated struggle for freedom.
Friday, April 10th, 1981: 23-year-old Mathias Domaschk boards the fast train from Jena to Berlin, on his way to a birthday party. But he never arrives . . .
Part reportage, part true crime, Generation GDR offers unique insights into the secret corridors of an authoritarian regime and delivers a powerful warning from history.
Children’s and YA
Genius Eyes: A Curious Animal Compendium by Lena Anlauf, illustrated by Vitali Konstantinov
Translated by Marshall Yarbrough
NorthSouth Books, September 2025
The third book in the Genius Animals series, this collection of incredible animals from around the world shares fun facts about animal eyes.
Mayhem at the Museum by Hannah Brückner
Translated by Laura Watkinson
NorthSouth Books, September 2025
When a fear of birds leads Yuri to knock down a colossal brachiosaurus skeleton, it takes some mindfulness and teamwork to solve the dinosaur disaster.
Me & the Magic Cube by Daniel Fehr, illustrated by GOLDEN COSMOS
Translated by Marshall Yarbrough
NorthSouth Books, September 2025
Three friends discover the magic and mathematics behind the popular Rubik’s Cube toy.
9 Little People by Regina Feldmann, illustrated by Martina Stuhlberger
NorthSouthBooks, September 2025
A sweet, joyous celebration of nine unique children and their lifelong friendship.
Buzz! Boom! Bang!: The Book of Sounds by Benjamin Gottwald
NorthSouth Books, September 2025
Readers can get loud as they make sounds to accompany each vibrant and playful illustration in this book which won the German Children’s Literature Prize in 2023.
Little Angel’s Christmas Song by Kerstin Hau, illustrated by Selda Marlin Soganci
Translated by Tammi Reichel
NorthSouth Books, September 2025
A little angel tries to find his purpose in the world in this touching story for Christmas–or any time–when you are looking to bring love and warmth to those around you.
Lizzy Longlegs by Kai Lüftner, illustrated by Wiebke Rauers Translated by Tim Mohr
NorthSouth Books, September 2025
Rock on with Lizzy Longlegs, the Goth Moth, and the Jitterbug in this book about not being afraid to be loud and proud about your passions! The third book in the Band of Bugs series.
Rainbow Fish and the Great Escape by Marcus Pfister
Translated by David Henry Wilson
NorthSouth Books, October 2025
When Rainbow Fish and his friends get captured in a fishing net, they must work together as a community to help the sea creatures escape.
The Water’s Call: Introducing Alea, The MerGir by Tanya Stewner
Translated by Matthew O. Anderson
Arctis, March 2025
AN AMAZON HOT NEW RELEASE FOR 2025
Unveiling her destiny as one of the Sea People, a foster child learns she can live underwater and embarks on an ecological fantasy adventure filled with mystery and magic.
Perfect for fans of middle-grade oceanic adventures like “Percy Jackson” and “The Girl Who Drank the Moon”.
The Colors of the Sea by Tanya Stewner
Translated by Matthew O. Anderson
Arctis, April 2025
Having established the character’s core motivations and traits in the first volume, Aleah Aquarius: The Colors of the Sea invites readers to explore the historical and cultural contours of Alea’s undersea world alongside her.
The Secret of the Oceans: Alea Aquarius 3: Volume 3 by Tanya Stewner
Translated by Matthew O. Anderson
Arctis, September 2025
Can Alea’s father help her make her dream come true? Answers await in the third volume of the great Mer-girl.
Poetry
The Wanderer’s Song: Essential Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Translated by John Kent
Pushkin Press, October 2025
‘He is incomparable… the age of Goethe extends not only over centuries but over millennia’ Thomas Mann
Novelist, scientist, courtier, poet – Goethe’s genius spanned disciplines in his lifetime, and has spanned the centuries since his death. Bringing together the stunning lyric poetry of the author of Faust, this fresh translation also gives us Goethe’s life from childhood to old age, captured in his verse.
With a gaze that embraces mountaintops and wayside flowers, warring gods and gingko leaves, this epoch-making poet unites us with life’s humble beauties, sublime sorrows, and deepest meanings.
Essays
The City and the World by Gregor Hens
Translated by Jen Calleja
Fitzcarraldo Editions, May 2025
In The City and the World, Gregor Hens explores the city in the twenty-first century – a space we shape and are shaped by in turn – and our place within it. Travelling from Berlin to Las Vegas, Shenzhen to Santiago de Chile, he moves through these pulsing, ever-expanding cityscapes, reading, walking, swimming, riding the metro and catching the bus, bearing witness to the strange vitality of urban life. Everywhere, catalysts for new understandings emerge.
Blending memoir, travelogue and philosophy with photography and literary insights, The City and the World is a witty, captivating, illuminating and expansive journey into the heart of the modern city.
