As the days grow shorter and the air turns crisp, there’s perhaps no better time to discover a new favourite book.
Whether you’re a long-time fan of German fiction or just looking for something fresh, why not pick up one of these recent English translations of beloved novels, which were originally published in German language.
For good measures, we’ve also included one book set in Switzerland and one set in Austria, as well as one work of non-fiction.
The Café with No Name
Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire
Setting: Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district, 1966–1976
Themes: Ordinary lives, community and hope
Written in his signature accessible style, with a keen eye for detail, Robert Seethaler’s The Café with No Name centres on Robert Simon, a war orphan and market labourer, who fulfils his dream by taking over a neglected café in the bustling Carmeliter Market.
His calm, non-judgemental nature soon attracts a diverse cast of customers – market workers, locals and visitors – each bringing their own stories of hope, heartbreak and everyday heroism.
The Café with No Name is a celebration of the everyday, a quietly powerful portrait of what it means to live through great change and still make the best of one’s circumstances.
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One Grand Summer
Ewald Arenz, translated by Rachel Ward
Setting: Rural West Germany, early 1980s
Themes: Coming of age, friendship and first love
A bestseller in Germany and winner of the German Booksellers Prize, Ewald Arenz’s One Grand Summer is a tender, evocative coming-of-age novel set in the early 1980s. The story follows sixteen-year-old Frieder, whose summer plans are upended when he fails two subjects at school.
Instead of joining his family on holiday, Frieder must stay with his grandmother Nana and strict step-grandfather Walther to study for his resits. What begins as a punishment soon becomes a transformative experience.
Woman in the Pillory
Brigitte Reimann, translated by Lucy Jones
Setting: Rural Germany during World War II
Themes: Forbidden desire, the legacy of Nazism and post-war reconstruction
A formative novella by one of East Germany’s most significant writers, Woman in the Pillory (first published in 1956 and now newly translated) follows Kathrin, who is five years into a disenchanting marriage and left to work the farm with her sister-in-law while her husband Heinrich is away fighting for the Nazis.
To help with the harvest, Heinrich arranges for 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.
Things That Disappear
Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals
Setting: Berlin
Themes: Impermanence and nostalgia
Winner of the International Booker Prize for Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Things That Disappear is a slim, poetic collection of thirty-one miniature essays that meditate on the phenomenon of disappearance in everyday life.
Erpenbeck’s vignettes range from the vanishing of objects – a sock, a piece of cheese, a Biedermeier wardrobe – to the fading of friendships, family laughter, and even entire ways of life, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demolition of the Palace of the Republic.
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Blood Book
Kim de l’Horizon, translated by Jamie Lee Searle
Setting: Switzerland
Themes: Generational trauma, gender and transformation
Winner of the German Book Prize, the Swiss Book Prize, and the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Literature Prize, Kim de l’Horizon’s Blood Book is a boundary-breaking debut that explores the tangled roots of family, the burdens of inheritance, and the search for an authentic self.
The novel is published as Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues in the U.S. and as Blood Book in the UK.
De l’Horizon’s debut is both a homage to those who came before and a radical act of self-creation, offering readers a new way of thinking about family, identity and the stories we inherit and invent.
Arson
Laura Freudenthaler, translated by Tess Lewis
Setting: A world ravaged by climate change
Themes: Environmental collapse, obsession and the search for meaning
Austrian author Laura Freudenthaler’s novel Arson is a feverish meditation on the terrifying consequences of climate change – especially wildfires.
Set against the backdrop of escalating environmental disaster, the story unfolds through the fragmented perspectives of two narrators: an unnamed journalist plagued by anxiety and writer’s block, and her friend Ulrich, a scientist obsessed with tracking wildfires and his own insomnia.
Freudenthaler’s fragmented, poetic prose blurs dreams, reality and time, creating a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world on the brink – where the only certainty is transformation through destruction.
READ ALSO: 10 German books you have to read before you die
Fateful Hours
Volker Ullrich, translated by Jefferson Chase
Setting: Germany, 1918–1933 (Weimar Republic)
Themes: Historical contingency and the rise of fascism
A work of non-fiction, Volker Ullrich’s Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic offers a riveting and timely account of Germany’s first experiment with democracy and its tragic unravelling into the Third Reich.
Ullrich, acclaimed for his biographies of Hitler, brings his signature clarity and depth to this history, tracing the Weimar Republic from its birth in the aftermath of World War I to its collapse with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933.
Essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics of democracy, the dangers of political complacency and the lessons of history.
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