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 Jon Cho-Polizzi
University of Wisconsin Press, September 2024
Peirene Press, October 2024
“A profoundly moving journey through grief toward freedom.”—Musa Okwonga, author of In the End, It Was All about Love
In this epic tale, Fatma Aydemir explores the lives of characters who could not be more different from one another—except in their insatiable desires to be understood. Rather than a seamless narrative, the novel circles around suppressed memories, unspoken trauma, and buried pasts. Turning expectations and stereotypes of the immigrant experience on their side, Aydemir shows how we all grapple with power and beauty, the holes in our lives, and the demons that hover just out of sight.
Read our original recommendation here.
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.’
A Simple Intervention by Yael Inokai
Translated by Marielle Sutherland
Peirene Press, October 2024
Read our interview with author Yael inokai here.
Read our original recommendation of this book here.
A queer love story between two nurses, this book is an exploration of misogyny, hierarchies of power, and mental health, through a feminist lens.
From the winner of the Swiss Prize for Literature 2018.
Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2022
Translated by Damion Searls
Pushkin Press, April 2024
An isolated young woman living in a small Swiss town decides to take in a mysterious stranger, known only as ‘the visitor’. His arrival introduces disturbance into her carefully sealed life, and the longer he stays, the more confounding he becomes. His joy causes her sadness, his sleep brings her insomnia, and she becomes convinced he is sneaking into her room, even eating her socks. As she tries to impose orders and regulations on her opaque visitor, the woman’s fantasies of power and control grow ever wilder.
Sly, wilful and full of slanted humour, Overstaying is a profound and uncanny exploration of hospitality, integration and the stranger within all of us.
Bad Sheep by Katja Lange-Müller
Translated by Simon Pare
Seagull Books, November 2024
Katja Lange-Müller, an acclaimed storyteller, skillfully draws readers into the heart of this novel. With sensitivity, humor, and melancholy, she unfolds the narrative of an unhappy love story that transforms into the greatest happiness in life. Along the way, Lange-Müller paints an atmospherically dense portrait of the divided and stagnant Berlin of the 1980s, creating a captivating and emotionally charged reading experience.
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.
Translated by Jo Heinrich
Peirene Press, September 2024
Half Swimmer is a collection of stories from one life, following a young girl as she attempts to forge her own identity under the social pressures of both the GDR, and the capitalism of a unified Germany.
Katja Oskamp knows how to capture the essence of people beautifully. They really come to life in her portraits. A powerful book.- Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany
The Lockmaster by Christopher Ransmayr
Translated by Simon Pare
Seagull Books, May 2024
A suspenseful novel that delves into the complexities of a father-son relationship and the timeless themes of guilt and forgiveness.
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.
The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink
Translated by Charlotte Collins,
Orion Publishing Co, October 2024 (and in the US, HarperVia, Jan 2025)
Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now’ Le Monde
‘The great novel of German reunification’ Le Figaro
From the author of the no.1 international bestseller The Reader, The Granddaughter is a gripping novel that transports us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to contemporary Australia, asking what might be found when it seems like all is lost.
Translated by Alta L Price
World Editions, October 2023
From Germany’s #1 bestselling author Juli Zeh comes a novel about prejudice, clichés, and people being forced to break through their self-imposed political, ideological and socio-economic silos to connect with each other. About People takes place in the middle of lockdown in spring 2020 and subtly describes the social and very private consequences of the pandemic
Crime
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Head of Zeus, December 2024
Read translator Jamie Bulloch’s recent interview with Sebastian Fitzek here.
Milan Berg is standing at a set of traffic lights when a car stops next to him. In the back seat he sees a frightened young girl. Desperate, she presses a piece of paper against the window.
Milan can’t read it – because he suffers from alexia, the inability to read or comprehend the written word. It’s a secret that he’s managed to hide for most of his life, even from friends and loved ones. But he understands the meaning of the note: the girl is in mortal danger.
With a twisty non-linear storyline that charts one man’s descent into a real-life nightmare, The Gift is perfect for fans of Chris Carter and Lars Kepler.
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Head of Zeus, September 2024
Read translator Jamie Bulloch’s recent interview with Sebastian Fitzek here.
A month ago, fifteen-year-old Feline Jagow disappeared on her way to school. Her distraught mother asks private investigator Alexander Zorbach, a former police detective, to discover her whereabouts.
Despite a month having elapsed since her disappearance, Feline’s music playlist was changed just a few days ago. Soon, the mystery of the playlist plunges Zorbach into a horrifying nightmare that mixes past terrors with new ones, and where no one’s survival is guaranteed…
Murder at the Castle by David Safier
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Old Street Publishing November 2024
Forget Miss Marple – here comes Miss Merkel.
After a gruelling stint as the most powerful woman in the world, Angela can finally put her feet up. With her husband Achim and their new pug Putin, she has retired to the idyllic village of Kleinfreudenstadt-on-Dumpfsee. But it isn’t easy to settle into country life. Angela’s fellow villagers all seem to want something from her.
When local aristo Baron von Baugenwitz is found poisoned and dressed in armour in a castle dungeon locked from the inside, new life stirs in Angela. Finally a problem that needs solving! Supported by her husband, her bodyguard – and of course Putin – she embarks on a dangerous hunt for the killer.
Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain by Joachim B. Schmidt
Translated by Jamie Lee Searle
Bitter Lemon Press, August 2024
Read our interview with translator Jamie Lee Searle here.
Kalmann is back! But he’s already in trouble; in an interrogation room at the FBI headquarters in Washington, no less. All he wanted to do was visit his American father, but the loveable sheriff of Raufarhöfn got himself mixed up in the January 2021 Capitol riots. Thanks to sympathetic FBI agent Dakota Leen, he’s soon on a plane home. But not before she informs him that his grandfather was on a blacklist, suspected of spying for the Russians during the Cold War. Back in Iceland, there’s a murder and one heck of a mystery to unravel. And what role does a mysterious mountain play in all this? Somehow Kalmann never loses heart. There’s no need to worry; he has everything under control.
Hunkeler’s Secret by Hansjörg Schneider
Translated by Astrid Freuler
Bitter Lemon Press, March 2025
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.
The city of Basel and neighbouring Alsace are evoked with great love by Schneider, who in real life lives on the same street and frequents the same bars and restaurants as Inspector Hunkele.
Nonfiction
Translated by Simon Pare
Scribe, August 2024
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists who uncovered the Panama Papers, a gripping, real-life thriller following the authors’ attempt to uncover the truth about one of the world’s most wanted men.
The End of Capitalism by Ulrike Hermann
Translated by David Shaw
Scribe, March 2025
How do we manage to transition to a more sustainable world without the collapse of the economy?
This a no-holds-barred, sweeping critique of capitalism’s insatiable need for growth and of currently favoured solutions to the environmental crisis, and a radical proposal for what the author believes has to be done and can be done.
Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer
New Vessel Press, February 2025
“An unflinching, politically charged visual and textual exploration into the norms of appearance. Awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize 2023 for non-fiction, the book explores who we are putting at the end of accusations of ugliness, and why.”—GQ Middle East
The Other ’68 A Social History of West Germany’s Revolt – Studies in German History by Christina von Hodenberg Translated by Rachel Ward
Oxford University Press, June 2024
The book is a new, revisionist account of Sixties protest movements in West Germany. It challenges established narratives centring male intellectuals by foregrounding families, private lives, women, and old people. Worked from a wealth of new archival sources, the narrative follows three generations of Germans living in the provincial town of Bonn through the turbulent years of the late 1960s. It offers a genuine social history of the period, decentring the story of West Germany’s 68 socially, geographically, and generationally.
Vertigo The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany by Harald Jähner
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
WH Allen, June 2024
‘This is one of the most gripping accounts of an era spanning war defeat, humiliation and failed revolution in 1918 to the violence, intimidation and propaganda of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. It contains many lessons for the world now.’ – John Kampfner, bestselling author of Why The Germans Do It Better
Hubris: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Humanity by Johannes Krause, Thomas Trappe
Translated by Sharon Howe
Polity, November 2024
In this compelling book, the leading archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe investigate what DNA can tell us about how we got to where we are and what our future might be. They show how the first humans were defeated again and again and suffered fatal setbacks, and how Homo sapiens succeeded in conquering continents, overcoming natural borders and bringing other species under their control.
But the genetic blueprint that enabled us to get to where we are today had one flaw: it didn’t factor in planetary boundaries. Now that we are approaching those boundaries for the first time after millions of years of evolution, an urgent question arises: can we learn to live within the available planetary limits?
Translated by Jo Heinrich, Sharon Howe, Lucy Jones, Ruth Martin, Simon Pare, Jamie Lee Searle, Alice Tetley-Paul and Shaun Whiteside
Pan Macmillan, November 2024
The long-awaited memoir by one of the most important political leaders of our time.
“What does freedom mean to me? This question has occupied me my entire life. Naturally, politically, because freedom needs democratic conditions, without democracy there is no freedom, no rule of law, no protection of human rights. But this question also occupies me on another level. Freedom, for me, is finding out where my own limits are, and pushing my own limits. Freedom is for me not to stop learning, not to have to stand still but to be allowed to continue, even after leaving politics.” – Angela Merkel
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Yale University Press, November 2024
Read the Kirkus review!
In the 1920s, the Gulf of Naples was a magnet for European intellectuals in search of places as yet untouched by modernity. Among the revolutionaries, artists, and thinkers drawn to Naples were numerous scholars at a formative stage in their journeys: Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Alfred Sohn‑Rethel, Asja Lacis, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others.
In this ingenious book, Martin Mittelmeier reveals the Gulf of Naples as the true birthplace of the Frankfurt School. From the majestic crater rim of Mount Vesuvius to the soft volcanic rock that Neapolitans used to build their city, Mittelmeier follows Adorno’s and his fellow thinkers’ footsteps through the cities along the gulf, demonstrating how their observations and encounters surface again and again in their writings for decades to come, and serve as the structuring principle of Critical Theory.
The Writers’ Castle Reporting History at Nuremberg by Uwe Neumahr
Translated by Jefferson Chase
Pushkin Press, August 2024
A gripping new approach to the Nuremberg Trial, told through the stories of the many great writers who came to witness it.
A riveting group portrait that puts these celebrity reporters in the spotlight… An engaging blend of gossipy anecdote and precise, thought-provoking analysis Financial Times
Translated by Stephen Brown
Haus Publishing, October 2024
Unravelling the threads of Sicilian history, Sartorius explores the city’s mingling of ancient and modern, Greek and Arab, medieval and baroque, creating a portrait of a city inseparably entwined with its past.
A Kind Life by Carina Wohlleben
Translated by Jane Billinghurst
Greystone Books Ltd, August 2024
What does it mean to live a kind life? In this inspiring book, a mother-of-two provides a blueprint for how she and her family adopted a plant-based lifestyle, sharing the eye-opening facts that convinced her they needed to make a change.
Photo by Prasanna Kumar on Unsplash
