The Greatest Books Since 1970 Written by German Authors

  1. 1 . Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

    Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man?s search for the answer to his life?s ce...

  2. 2 . Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson

    A translation of the first two volumes of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage.

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  3. 3 . Perfume by Patrick Suskind

    Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more ...

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  4. 4 . The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

    Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape ...

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  5. 5 . The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

    The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead was written by Heinrich Boll, one of Germany's most prolific postwar writers. Although Boll insisted that his char...

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  6. 6 . The Emigrants by Winfried Georg Sebald

    Four narratives weave history and fiction together as refugees from the Holocaust remember their experiences.

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  7. 7 . The Parable of the Blind by Gert Hofmann

    Der Blindensturz (1985) (translated as The Parable of the Blind) is the title of short novel in ten chapters by German writer Gert Hofmann. Inspired by Parabel der Blinden (1568), a painting by Ne...

  8. 8 . Couples, Passersby by Botho Strauß

    Couples, Passersby (German: Paare, Passanten) is a 1981 short story collection by the German writer Botho Strauß. It consists of narrative vignettes and aphoristic sequences divided into six sectio...

  9. 9 . The Swarm by Frank Schatzing

    Whales begin sinking ships. Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island's water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the...

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  10. 10 . Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll

    Group Portrait with Lady (German: Gruppenbild mit Dame) is a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Böll, published in 1971. The novel centers around a woman named Leni, and her friends, foes...

  11. 11 . Patterns of Childhood by Christa Wolf

    Patterns of Childhood, originally published as Kindheitsmuster in German, is a book written by Christa Wolf and published in 1976. Christa Wolf was a prominent East German novellist known for works...

  12. 12 . Vertigo by W. G. Sebald

    Vertigo (German: Schwindel. Gefühle.) is a 1990 novel by the German author W. G. Sebald. The first of its four sections is a short but conventional biography of Stendhal, who is referred to not by ...

  13. 13 . The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind

    The Pigeon (German: Die Taube) is a novella by Patrick Süskind about the fictional character Jonathan Noel, a solitary Parisian bank security guard who undergoes an existential crisis when a pigeon...

  14. 14 . The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm

    The Invention of Curried Sausage is a novella by German author Uwe Timm detailing the fictionalized invention of curried sausage in Germany, as well as describing life in Hamburg in post-war German...

  15. 15 . The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck

    Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of t...

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  16. 16 . Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann

    Measuring the World (German: Die Vermessung der Welt) is a novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann, 2005 published by Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek. The novel re-imagines the lives of German mathematicia...

  17. 17 . The Young Man by Botho Strauß

    The Young Man (German: Der junge Mann) is a 1984 novel by the German writer Botho Strauß. It has a frame story about a man who enters the world of theatre, but the book mainly consists of phantasma...

  18. 18 . The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

    Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last fore...

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  19. 19 . Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

    Heat and Dust (1975) is a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala which won the Booker Prize in 1975. The events of the story take place in India, during the periods of the British Raj in the 1920s and th...

  20. 20 . Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

    A bestseller in Germany, Visitation has established Jenny Erpenbeck as one of Europe’s most significant contemporary authors. A house on the forested bank of a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin (once...

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  21. 21 . Alberta empfängt einen Liebhaber by Birgit Vanderbeke

    no translation. Original is in German

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  22. 22 . Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf

    Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The new Sorrows of Young W.) is an analytic collage-style novel (montage novel) and play by Ulrich Plenzdorf. - Wikipedia

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  23. 23 . Women by Charles Bukowski

    Women is a 1978 novel written by Charles Bukowski, starring his semi-autobiographical character Henry Chinaski. In contrast to Factotum, Post Office and Ham on Rye, Women is centered around Chinask...