When Books Meet Music: The Static Roots & Proust Cooperation 2026

East Berlin, the late 1980s: nineteen-year-old Katharina and a married writer in his fifties begin an affair that slowly curdles as the GDR itself dissolves around them. Erpenbeck turns a private obsession into the portrait of a whole vanished country. Michael Hofmann's translation won the International Booker Prize in 2024.

A gothic family saga that follows an aristocratic Hungarian dynasty from the turn of the twentieth century to the uprising of 1956, through dark forests, two world wars and quiet ruin. The Swiss author wrote it in his early twenties, and it became a sensation across Europe. Translated by Jamie Bulloch.

Herr Schmidt has reached retirement without ever learning to fry an egg, because his wife Barbara always did everything. When she can no longer get out of bed, he has to become, late and clumsily, the caring husband he never was. A short, sharp, unexpectedly tender comedy about a marriage seen too late.

Kreuzberg, autumn 1989: Frank Lehmann tends bar, dodges responsibility and drifts toward his thirtieth birthday, which happens to land on the night the Wall comes down. Wry, deadpan and full of love for a West Berlin about to disappear. Regener, who fronts the band Element of Crime, writes the way the city talked.

Stanišić fled the war in Yugoslavia as a boy and rebuilt a life in Germany, and here he tells that story through memory, family myth and even a choose-your-own-adventure ending. It is a book about origins, language and the homelands we both remember and invent. It won the German Book Prize in 2019.

Stanišić's debut looks at the breakup of Yugoslavia through the eyes of a boy who would rather tell stories than face the violence around him. Funny, inventive and heartbreaking by turns, it announced one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary German fiction. Translated by the great Anthea Bell.

Two Enlightenment geniuses set out to measure the world: the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who does it by climbing every mountain and wading every river, and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who barely leaves his desk. Kehlmann turns the birth of modern science into a sly, very funny double portrait, and one of the biggest German novels of the century.

A young man who has shut himself in his room for two years finally steps outside and meets, on a park bench, a burned-out salaryman hiding from his own family. Two lonely people slowly start telling each other the truth. A quiet, luminous novel from the Austrian writer about the people modern life leaves behind.

Sixteen-year-old Frieder flunks two subjects and is packed off to his grandparents' for a summer of resits, a strict step-grandfather, and a girl in a green swimsuit. What follows is friendship, first love and a season that quietly reshapes a life. Warm, nostalgic and gently devastating.

As the Soviet Union falls apart, two women from what is now Ukraine fight to hold their families together, then carry that upheaval with them to Germany, where their daughters inherit it. A novel about migration, history and the things passed down between mothers and daughters, told with extraordinary warmth and nerve.

A cultural history that follows artists, writers and lovers through the 1930s as fascism closes in across Europe. Illies tells it in short, cinematic scenes, so that love and catastrophe unfold side by side. As absorbing as a novel, and entirely true.

Across four decades, one family's story moves between revolutionary Iran and exile in West Germany, told in turn by parents and children. It is a book about what happens after a revolution, and about a hope that refuses to die. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2026.

Three friends come of age in contemporary Germany, navigating friendship, racism and the everyday weight of being told you do not quite belong. Sharp, angry and tender all at once. A novel that holds up a mirror to who gets to feel at home.

Set in a Kurdish community somewhere in the Ruhrgebiet, this is the story of two teenagers, Amal and Raffiq, and a woman who refuses every rule the neighbourhood lives by. The book can be read from either end, two versions of the same summer. Taha was born in Iraq and grew up in our own region, studying in Duisburg-Essen.

In a fading village in the Icelandic far north, Kalmann, shark-hunter, neurodivergent and self-appointed sheriff, finds a pool of blood in the snow and no body to go with it. Part murder mystery, part character study, wholly its own thing. Written in German by a Swiss author who made Iceland his home.

It is 1966, and Robert Simon takes over a small café on the edge of a Vienna market. The regulars drift in, traders, widows, a wrestler, a painter, and their lives play out over coffee and wine as the city changes around them. From the Austrian author of A Whole Life, a gentle and deeply human novel about an ordinary place.

A country boy arrives in 1930s Vienna to work in a tobacco shop and strikes up an unlikely friendship with one of his regular customers: Sigmund Freud. As the Nazis tighten their grip, the young man comes of age in a darkening city. Tender, funny and quietly heartbreaking.

A man waits for an electrician and reads a novel about a mafia informant who, in his cell, is reading a novel about a man waiting for an electrician. Inspired by the impossible staircases of M. C. Escher, the two stories spiral into each other until they meet. A dazzling, very funny puzzle from the Austrian master.

By day Juno cares for her seriously ill husband; by night, sleepless, she trades messages with the online love scammers who try to con her. Out of those lies, something almost like tenderness begins to grow. A luminous novel about ageing, desire and connection that won the German Book Prize in 2024.

A woman wakes in a hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps to find an invisible wall sealing her off from a world where all other life appears to have stopped. With a dog, a cow and a cat, she learns to survive, and to write it all down. A 1963 classic of the German-speaking world, rediscovered by each new generation. The English translation first appeared in 1990 and is in print again now.