Austrian writer Gertraud Klemm’s novel Unicellular (Einzeller) vividly explores the dilemmas of today’s feminism. “Woman” is not a homogeneous category. Women position themselves differently and their feminist goals differ accordingly. This is something that I learned when engaging with postcolonial feminism and the critique of feminists of Colour that white feminists often ignore their needs and demands. Klemm, however, focuses on generational conflicts with her two protagonists Simone and Lilly, a publicly well-known second-wave feminist in her 50s and a woke 21-year-old who bases her decisions on a politically correct Instagram bubble. The novel doesn’t paint an attractive picture of the current state of feminism, but the critique of its fragmentation is eye-opening and to the point. The characters attempt to practice feminist solidarity, but it is certainly not an easy ideal to live by.

Carolina Schutti’s Ocean Breeze (Meeresbrise) is a beautifully written, slim, yet powerful novel about growing up as an outsider in a small village. The story is narrated by a young girl whose only friend is her younger sister and who believes in the tales her single mother tells. But even before the narrator fully notices, the reader will learn that underneath the beauty and the magic of these tales lies a less glamorous reality, one that society punishes: the girls have different fathers who may or may not be dead; the mother is on welfare and supplements their income through phone sex; she often abandons the girls, either locking them in the apartment or leaving them to roam freely in the forest. The tone of the novel is often playful and naïve, but the book still invites readers to think about class, norms, mother-daughter relationships and many other serious social issues. Ocean Breeze (Meeresbrise) stayed with me long after I finished reading it, because of the ambivalence and the refusal to blame that Schutti maintains throughout.

I probably wouldn’t have picked up Ulrike Draesner’s Penetrating Silence(Die Verwandelten), if it hadn’t been selected by the NBG jury. And I’m glad I did, because what a book! Sensitive, beautifully sad and absolutely haunting. This multi-generational novel centres on the Nazi Lebensborn programme, which I hadn’t heard about before, but which was an association that worked towards increasing the number of – in Nazi terms “racially pure” – children. Adele, a cook from Breslau, is measured and racially classified before she is admitted to Lebensborn. Just before World War II, she is forced to give her child away. Alissa becomes Gerhild and is raised by a rich Nazi couple. This traumatic experience changes Alissa forever and strongly influences her relationship with her own daughter Kinga. In over 400 pages we learn about these women and some other female relatives. In this carefully crafted and highly lyrical novel Draesner gives them their voices back. I particularly liked the fragmentary use of (various) language(s), the gender inclusive expressions and the sensitivity of the various narrative voices for experiences that seem unspeakable.

Fatma Aydemir’s novel Djinns (Dschinns) was one of my favourite books of 2022. The complexity of migration, family, relationships, mental health and life choices lie at the centre of the novel. Djinns lives from its excellently developed characters, all members of the Turkish-Kurdish Yilmaz family, who emigrated to Germany when Hüseyin, the father, was recruited as a so-called “guest worker”. All of the family members have their own voice and worldview.

A 2021 favourite of mine was Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (translated by Alta L. Price), which is quite unique for the German context. Discussions about identity have long been conducted on Twitter, and the number of corresponding nonfiction books has grown significantly in Germany in recent years. But Sanyal has created a fictional story that takes a multi-voiced, smart, and critical approach to the highly complex topic of racial passing. Sanyal herself says in the afterword, “identity struggles are struggles over fictions in reality,” and so she weaves the two together in her book.

NBG doesn’t only select novels. The selection also includes nonfiction books that cannot be recommended enough. Emilia Roig‘s Why We Matter: The End of Oppression can be read as a wonderfully accessible introduction to the concept of intersectionality. Moving at a rapid pace, the book takes a look at the multiple facets of oppression and how they overlap in nearly all areas of life.

Lately, I’ve been getting more into food writing – literature that makes food its subject and goes far beyond recipes or cooking techniques. That’s why I picked up Karina Urbach’s How the Nazi’s stole my grandmothers cookbook (translated by Jamie Bulloch). It wasn’t so much about food, but revealed yet another facet of the Nazi regime that I hadn’t known before. Karina Urbach pieces together the story of her grandmother Alice Urbach, a Jewish chef who lived in Vienna in the early 20^th Century. Alice Urbach’s bestselling cookbook was reissued under a male Aryan pseudonym and Jewish heritage recipes were replaced. It took until 2021 for the rights to be returned posthumously. This was not a singular case, it happened to many Jewish authors. Some publishing houses have already publicly apologised, others still need to acknowledge their responsibility.