As he travels towards Rome he wrestles with the enigma of his own identity while pursued by his murderous doppelganger. The monk's only hope for salvation lies with the beautiful Aurelie; but in order to escape the curse which lies over his family, he must evade the sinister powers of the living and the dead. In this lively and disturbing gothic tale, Hoffmann combines elements of the fantastic and the sublime to analyse the seductive ambiguities of art and the deeply divided nature of the human imagination.

    But his son—the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel—is curious about Walter’s experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father’s early life.This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, seventeen-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and in many ways the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable.

    Utterly accurate in its depiction of historical and military events and astoundingly rich in detail, Cafe Berlin is vivid and compelling.

    His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to establish a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a pitiable, misunderstood outsider and a rigid ideologue, and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht's novel, an international bestseller, is funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant. His allusions are misleading, his historical time line is twisted, his narrator is unreliable--and the result is a novel that is a cabinet of mirrors, a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, Imperium is impossible to categorize and utterly unlike anything you've read before.

    Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner’s story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.

    Surrounded by jealous & hateful enemies, Süß helps the Duke create a corrupt state that involves them both in immense wealth & power.

    Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany.

    And before long The Wave, with its rules of "strength through discipline, community, and action", sweeps from the classroom through the entire school. And as most of the students join the movement, Laurie Saunders and David Collins recognize the frightening momentum of The Wave and realize they must stop it before it's too late.

    The Last World is the story of a young man's quest for the exiled poet Ovid and the masterwork he has consigned to the flames. Ransmayr has created a visionary landscape, a transformed place where the ancient world meets the twentieth century. A metaphysical thriller both compelling and profound. The Last World draws the reader into a universe governed by the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of apocalypse. A novel about exile, censorship, and the destruction of the planet, this is a cultural and political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.

    The protagonist, Leonard Marnham, is a 25-year-old, naive, unsophisticated English post office technician who is astonished and alarmed to find himself involved in a top-secret operation. At the same time that he loses his political innocence, Leonard experiences his sexual initiation in a clandestine affair with a German divorcee five years his senior. As his two secret worlds come together, events develop into a gruesome nightmare, building to a searing, unforgettable scene of surrealist intensity in which Leonard and his lover try to conceal evidence of a murder. Acting to save himself from a prison sentence, Leonard desperately performs an act of espionage whose ironic consequences resonate down the years to a twister of an ending. Though its plot rivals any thriller in narrative tension, this novel is also a character study--of a young man coming of age in bizarre circumstances, and of differences in national character: the gentlemanly Brits, all decorum and civility; the brash, impatient Americans; the cynical Germans. McEwan's neat, tensile prose raises this book to the highest level of the genre.

    Julia, a young and brilliant German designer, is about to launch the fashion show that could bring the breakthrough success she has sacrificed so much to achieve. All her dreams for the future are on the brink of reality—until an unknown past comes to find her. A grandfather she never knew existed approaches her with an astonishing claim. Julia’s father, believed dead for decades, is still alive. As a great lie is revealed, Julia embarks on a journey to uncover the lost pieces of her past. It takes her on a tour through Italy—from Milan to Naples to Sicily, back three generations to an immigrant heritage that struggled to build new roots in Germany after the war, and to secrets that have remained hidden for sixty years.Milan, 1954. Vincent, a handsome German engineer for BMW, arrives with the task of testing the Isetta, a revolutionary Italian car. His interpreter is the talented and enigmatic Giulietta, and the two soon fall passionately in love. Giulietta is full of life and dreams—she loves to design and sew clothes—but is held back by her family, who emigrated from Sicily, and by a promise that already binds her to another man. She will find herself forced to choose between love and duty, freedom and tradition—it is a choice that will mark the fate of generations to come.A saga of love and loss between two people and two countries, Anywhere But Home is a heartbreakingly beautiful story of forging new lives across foreign landscapes and cultures, of old wounds and forgiveness, and of the enduring bonds of family.

    In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country."An honest, rich book. . . . It is one those rare books that come back at odd moments to intrude on your comfortable conclusions and easy images."—Robert Houston, Nation

    Suppose that without your noticing, it became dangerous for some people to live in Germany any longer. Suppose you found, to your complete surprise, that your own father was one of those people.That is what happened to Anna in 1933. She was nine years old when it began, too busy with her schoolwork and toboganning to take much notice of political posters, but out of them glared the face of Adolf Hitler, the man who would soon change the whole of Europe – starting with her own small life.Anna suddenly found things moving too fast for her to understand. One day, her father was unaccountably missing. Then she herself and her brother Max were being rushed by their mother, in alarming secrecy, away from everything they knew – home and schoolmates and well-loved toys – right out of Germany…

    Her life appears to be a seamless tissue of boredom, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night to watch live sex shows and sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first, but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity, suppressed violence, and human degradation.Celebrated throughout Europe for the intensity and frankness of her writings and awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original and controversial writers in the world today. The Piano Teacher was made into a film, released in the United States in 2001, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.

    A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails