Eight essays on literature, language, art, Europe and life from one of Germany’s most revered living writers. After a visit to Putin’s old postbox, the reader is taken to Dresden and Brixton, Gdańsk and Minsk, diverted to birds, bees, stray cats and pet dogs, confronted with Stasi and KGB, Proust and Jah Shaka, puzzled by …
„You’ll live out your lives in a foreign country,“ Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you’re far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before …
‘Madgermanes’ is what the Mozambican workers once contracted out to East Germany are called today. At the end of the 1970s, some 20,000 of them were sent from the People’s Republic of Mozambique to the GDR to labour for their socialist sister country. After the Berlin Wall fell, almost all of them lost their residency …
V&Q Books Title Told with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother’s early death. Ever close to her loving …
V&Q Books Title Francis Nenik’s thrilling slice of narrative non-fiction »Journey through a Tragicomic Century« is about the life of the forgotten writer Hasso Grabner, told with great joy in language and love of absurdity. The journey takes us from the Young Communists in 1920s Leipzig to wartime Crete, with Grabner falling from steelworks director …
V&Q Books Title Sandra Hoffmann’s »Paula« is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer’s relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce? …
‘There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.’ After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her …