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 dramatic arts.
Clicking the ‘Enjoy in English’ tag above or here will bring up older editions of this page.
Fiction
Translated by Gary Schmidt
University of Wisconsin Press, April 2025
In his early thirties, Kurt Endlicher has settled into a steady job as a teacher and a small flat of his own. Initially irritated by the thin walls and the constant noise from his neighbors, he eventually learns to appreciate the value of community and finds the key to his own happiness. Set in Vienna during the mid-2010s, a time of political conflict and social change, the novel follows Kurt, a gay man and a sympathetic listener, which leads him to revisit and re evaluate assumptions.
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar
Translated by Ruth Martin
Scribe, June 2025
A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran.
We always think we know something about people, but then Shida Bazyar brilliantly shows us how much we still have to learn – Olga Grjasnowa, author of City of Jasmine.’
Berlin Shuffle by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
Translated by Philip Boehm
Metropolitan Books, November 2025 and Pushkin Press, January 2026
A darkly comic, prophetic novel about social decay in 1920s Berlin by the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Passenger.
Channel Swimmer by Ulrike Draesner
Translated by Rebecca Braun
Upper West Side Philosophers, April 2025
Charles, an Oxford scientist on the eve of retirement, decides to counter his wife’s mid-life dream of an expanded marriage with his own: swimming the English Channel – at least once in his life. His Channel crossing turns into an ordeal, a rite of passage, and, ultimately, a tribute to the vagaries of love. At the end of his quest, Charles realizes that he cannot jump over his own shadow. He can only swim across and through it.
Paradise Garden by Elena Fischer
Translated by Alexandra Roesch
The Indigo Press, June 2025
Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023, Paradise Garden is a spellbinding journey and a deeply affecting story of class, resilience and belonging.
A gripping coming of age tale full of soul and heart. I absolutely adored this amazing book.
Kate Hamer, author of The Lost Girls and The Girl in the Red Coat
A Shadow of Myself by Peter Flamm
Translated by Simon Pare
Pushkin Press, October 2025
A vivid, hallucinatory rediscovered classic about split identity in the wake of First World War trauma, translated into English for the first time.
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
Prototype, February 2025
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.
Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler
Translated by Imogen Taylor
The Other Press, May 2025
Set in a German spa town wracked by climate change, this intense, enthralling debut explores trust, abuse, and solidarity through the unexpected bond between two women.
Read our original recommendation here.
We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
Granta Magazine Editions, April 2025
The first title in the Granta Magazine Editions series: a hybrid work of autofiction from one of the most highly regarded writers working in Germany today.
When Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst in the middle of the night on Berlin’s Kastanienallee, it sparks an exploration of the moments and memories that make up a life: an intense friendship with another young mother; an unconventional childhood with long summers spent on the German coast; and the ties of familial trauma that echo through generations.
Read our original recommendation here.
The Freedom of Emma Herwegh by Dirk Kurbjuweit
Translated by Imogen Taylor
The Text Publishing Company, November 2023
A gripping novel based on the life of the 19th-century revolutionary Emma Herwegh
As the daughter of a well-regarded family, Emma Siegmund causes a scandal by marrying the revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh. Committed to the socialist cause, she becomes the only woman to join the armed troops that bring the revolution from France to Germany in 1848. But when Georg falls madly in love with Natalie, the wife of his comrade Alexander Herzen, Emma finds her ideals challenged, setting off a private battle of fidelity and betrayal.
Translated by Charlotte Collins
Scribe, November 2024 (and January 2025 Australia, February 2025 US)
Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.
Read our original recommendation here.
Translated by Peter Kuras
Granta Magazine Editions, May 2025
Read our original recommendation here.
‘Leif Rand depicts with stunning emotional clarity the trials millennials must go through to come to know
Vincenzo Latronico
themselves in the digital age. Allegro Pastel paints an intimate portrait of Berlin at the peak of its mythos: a
place of freedom and nonconformism flickering on the threshold of becoming something else – more
normalised, more serene, less exciting perhaps’
Translated by Ayça Türkoğlu
MTO Press, December 2024
Read NBG’s original recommendation here.
How do you live with violence and dread? How do you cope with the threat of them recurring? These are among the urgent questions posed by Cemile Sahin’s second novel, and the first to be translated into English, All Dogs Die—a haunting and brilliant tale of people on the edge.
Translated by Tess Lewis
NYRB October 2024, And Other Stories September 2023
Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.
Translated by Rachel Ward
Quercus, January 2025
The last in the Dunbridge Academy romance series that’s perfect for anyone who loves Hannah Grace, Elsie Silver and LJ Shen.
The Effingers: A Berlin Saga by Gabriele Tergit
Translated by Sophie Duvernoy,
NYRB Classics (US) and Pushkin Press (UK), November 2025
An engrossing, monumental epic of German-Jewish life in Berlin over four generations.
With dazzling historical sweep, Gabriele Tergit tells of one family’s changing fortunes within the vibrantly evoked, ever-changing metropolis of Berlin. Bursting with life and vivid characters, The Effingers is a monumental novel that bears witness to a vanished world of Berlin’s Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity.
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.
Crime
Hunkeler’s Secret By Hansjörg Schneider
Translated by Astrid Freuler
Bitter Lemon Press, March 2025
The latest in the international crime series featuring Inspector Peter Hunkeler, to follow on from the success of The Murder of Anton Livius, prize-winning The Basel Killings and Silver Pebbles, selected by the FT as a thriller of the month.
Hunkeler, now a retired inspector of the Basel police force, is hospitalized and sharing a room with Stephan Fankhauser, an old acquaintance terminally ill with cancer. One night, a groggy Hunkeler wakes up to see a young nurse with a ruby ring on her hand administering an injection to his friend. The following day Fankhauser is found dead. Was the injection just a dream? Does the
night nurse not usually wear a small diamond ring? There was no autopsy and a quick cremation.
Hunkeler resolves to get to the bottom of the matter despite the objections of his ex-colleagues, who want the retired inspector to stay well clear of the investigation.
Nonfiction
American Journalist’s in Hitler’s Germany by Norman Domeier
Translated by Jessica Spengler
Boydell & Brewer, January 2025
This book critically examines the roles of American journalists and media companies in Nazi Germany. It reveals their knowledge of Germany’s secret plans prior to and during the Second World War, and it details the clandestine exchange of news photographs between AP and the Nazis from 1942 to 1945. Thousands of AP photos were used in the Nazi press, while AP distributed some 40,000 Nazi photographs to US newspapers. Domeier’s book reignites the debate on the relationship between political power and the media, opening up new perspectives on the political and cultural history of journalism.
In the Forest of Metropoles by Karl-Markus Gauß
Translated by Tess Lewis
Seagull Books, May 2025
A chronicle of the diversity and wealth of cultures, predominantly from Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary Europe but now risk being forgotten.
A Herodotus of Mitteleuropa, cultural historian Karl-Markus Gauß is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the breadth and complexities of cultures and societies in Europe before, during, and after its decades of division in the twentieth century.
Dimming the Sun The Urgent Case for Geoengineering by Thomas Ramge
Translated by Monika Werner
The Experiment, March 2025
A groundbreaking, vital examination of a powerful—and extremely controversial—stopgap solution to looming climate catastrophe
Earth stands at a tipping point. As we fail to curtail emissions fast enough, our planet stares down a cascade of imminent, catastrophic, and irreversible disaster triggered by climate change. Yet a potent technology already exists to buy us more time: solar geoengineering. Through methods such as atmospheric aerosols, human-generated cirrus clouds, and solar sails, we humans can—at least in the short term—slow the Earth’s warming. Should we?
Translated by Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
ARC Humanities Press, January 2025
This book examines the ways in which people wrote about and engaged with infertility in the German Middle Ages. For some, childlessness is a huge problem, for others, a high ideal. Regina Toepfer considers the reasons for these differences, and how ideas changed over the period, revealing different narrative patterns that shape stories of childlessness right up to the present day.
The Buried City Unearthing the Real Pompeii by Gabriel Zuchtriegel
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Hodder Press (UK), Chicago University Press (US), May 2025
The best book on Pompeii I’ve ever read
Stephen Fry
In this revelatory history, Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the new secrets of Pompeii. Over the last few years, a vast stretch of the city has been excavated for the first time. Now, drawing on these astonishing discoveries, The Buried City reveals the untold human stories that are at last emerging.
Children and YA
Translated by Claire Storey
Dedalus Books, March 2025
This book was chosen by the NBG jury, read our recommendation here.
Set in 1941, 12-year-old Rolf, his dog Adi and his father Ludwig are fleeing from the Gestapo. It is a journey which develops a bond and a friendship between the two young boys as they learn to trust each other and learn from one another.
The Path is inspired by true events.
Translated by Polly Lawson
Floris Books, May 2025
This interactive bedtime picture book asks young readers to clap, call and count as they help Mama Owl put her ten little owls to bed.
The Ghosts of Pandora Pickwick by Christina Wolff
Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
Arctis Books (US), March 2025
Mia feels so at home in her Aunt Harriet’s antique shop. But something is wrong in the store. Things disappear as if by magic. Furniture that has just been wiped clean is dusty again in seconds. And there are eerie sounds coming from the attic at night. However, her aunt acts as if this is completely normal. Mia, on the other hand, suspects that Harriet is hiding something from her—and not just the question of who her birth parents are.
Poetry
Psyche Running Selected Poems, 2005–2022 by Durs Grünbein
Translated by Karen Leeder
Seagull Books, May 2024
A dazzling selection of more than one hundred poems that trace the development of Durs Grünbein’s work over the past two decades.
Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash
