Archives de catégorie : Fiction

NACHTWANDERUNG de Cornelia Achenbach

A delicate novel about best friends and our longing for inner peace.

NACHTWANDERUNG
(Night Walk)
by Cornelia Achenbach
Goldmann/PRH Verlagsgruppe, March 2022

Ines and Kirsten thought they would be best friends for ever. But their friendship is shattered when Ines isn’t there for Kirsten during a desperately difficult time. The two girls never meet again. Now, more than twenty years later, Ines is a working mother and trying her best to live up to the demands she places on herself. When an invitation to a school reunion awakens long-suppressed memories, she is forced to admit that the loss of the friend she once so admired has shaped her whole life. At the reunion, she suddenly finds herself standing in front of Kirsten. But their encounter doesn’t turn out as Ines expected – and she begins to question everything. Are the two women really who they thought they were?

Cornelia Achenbach, born in 1982, studied politics and Romance languages and literature and works for the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. NACHTWANDERUNG is her second novel.

DER AUSFLUG de Dirk Kurbjuweit

A shocking journey into the heart of Germany’s darkness.

DER AUSFLUG
(The Trip)
by Dirk Kurbjuweit
‎ Penguin Germany/PRH Verlagsgruppe, February 2022

Childhood friends Amalia, Josef, Gero and Bodo are on a summer canoeing trip. However, the moment they arrive at their destination it’s clear that they aren’t welcome. Josef in particular, who is black, senses the locals’ discomfort in his presence. They evidently deeply dislike anything that looks remotely foreign. But should the friends let themselves be intimidated by a few backward provincials? Should they simply give in? Amalia, Josef, Gero and Bodo are determined to stay, and from that moment on there’s no turning back. Every step they take leads them closer to the abyss. They all know that this trip won’t end well, but none of them wants to admit it. Soon their summer adventure becomes a desperate effort to get out of this place alive.

Dirk Kurbjuweit, born in 1962, is one of the most versatile and productive authors of our time. Known to a broad readership as a reporter for Zeit and Spiegel, he has been a convincing narrator from an early age. Critics celebrated his works and several of his literary successes served as models for film adaptations and radio play adaptations. His books have been translated into numerous languages.

UNSER GLÜCK de Natalie Buchholz

What happens to us when our home becomes a financial bargaining chip?

UNSER GLÜCK
(Our Good Fortune)
by Natalie Buchholz
‎ Penguin Germany/PRH Verlagsgruppe, February 2022

When the young parents Franziska and Coordt find a lovely – and affordable – flat in one of Munich’s best neighbourhoods, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. But there’s a condition attached: it won’t be just them and their small boy living there. Tempted by the chance of owning their own home, and one they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, they agree to a deal that will put their love to the test. Like a catalyst, the new flat accelerates and deepens existing cracks in their relationship, and their son, too, is aware of the increasing friction between them. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has turned out to be a trap. Will they find a way out?
Natalie Buchholz has created an irresistible story, written in clear, rhythmic prose. A novel set up like an experiment, showing the freedom that improved living conditions can bring – and the destructive power of financial pressure.

Natalie Buchholz, born in France in 1977, studied Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice at the University of Hildesheim and at the Université Aix-Marseille. In 2018, her debut novel The Red Swimming Pool was published. In 2020 she was awarded the Spiegelungen Prize for minimal prose.

OPEN THROAT de Henry Hoke

A mountain lion is on the brink of starvation in the urban landscape of Los Angeles. As it observes the city’s perilous beauty and confronts climate change, inequality and love, the animal asks itself: Does it want to eat a human, or become one?

OPEN THROAT
by Henry Hoke
MCD/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Summer 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

A stinging, elegiac snapshot of contemporary Los Angeles, told, you guessed it, from the perspective of a queer, dangerously hungry mountain lion, isolated and struggling to survive in a drought-devastated Griffith Park. As it protects the precarious welfare of a nearby homeless encampment from its thicket, it confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, taking us on a tour that spans the city’s cruel inequalities to the toll of climate grief, all while grappling with the complexities of its own gender identity and memories of a vicious, absent father.
In stinging, unpunctuated prose, OPEN THROAT delivers searching, exclamatory observations of a strange, seductive and elusive world, rich with wonder and menace, for a creature who knows it’s come to the wrong place at the wrong time. Even as salvation (in the form of a loving and witchy teen daughter of an aging rock star) appears within reach, there’s no escaping our primal pressures as the inevitable reckoning rushes in like wildfire.

Henry Hoke is the author of the memoir, Sticker (Bloomsbury Object Lessons), The Book of Endless Sleepovers, the story collection, Genevieves, and the novel, The Groundhog Forever. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Triangle House, The Offing, and the Catapult anthology, Tiny Crimes. He holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for five years, and presently teaches at the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop and lives in Brooklyn. Praise for his work can be found here: https://henryhoke.com/

THE PUZZLE MASTER de Danielle Trussoni

An ingenious literary thriller that combines everything I want in a book: immersive, exhilarating, intellectually provocative, unputdownable—an absolutely blistering Russian nesting doll of fascinating stories that unveil and dismantle some of the most deeply engrained ideas about good, evil, and the origins of humankind. In short: THE PUZZLE MASTER = (The Da Vinci Code + The Silent Patient + sprinkle of Stephen King) x gorgeous writing” –Angie Kim, bestselling author of Miracle Creek

THE PUZZLE MASTER
by Danielle Trussoni
‎ Random House, June 2023
(via Writers House)

All the world is a puzzle, and 28-year-old Mike Brink—a celebrated and ingenious puzzle constructor—understands its patterns like no one else. Once a promising football star, he was transformed by a traumatic brain injury that caused a rare (but real) medical condition: Sudden Acquired Savant Syndrome. The injury left him with a mental superpower—he can solve puzzles, calculate equations, and see patterns in ways the rest of us can’t. But his condition has also left him damaged: he feels deeply isolated because of his talent, and unable to fully connect with other people. Puzzle-solving has become Mike Brink’s only way to manage his gift and maintain emotional well-being.
Jess Price is serving 30 years in prison for murder but she has not spoken a word since her arrest five years before. When she draws a perplexing puzzle, her psychiatrist believes it will explain the crime she committed, and arranges for Mike Brink to meet Jess in prison and decipher the puzzle. What begins as a desire to crack a strange an alluring cipher quickly morphs into an obsession with the woman who drew the puzzle. When Jess Price reveals that there is something more urgent, and more dangerous, behind her silence, Mike Brink is thrust into the hunt for truth.
THE PUZZLE MASTER is a tantalizing, addictive novel of ideas that grabs the reader from page one, escalates tension with each puzzle, and delivers a dizzying finale. Blending elements of religious mysticism and historical research (the research information sheet is here) with vivid fictional elements, Danielle Trussoni creates a seamless world where reality and imagination meet.

Danielle Trussoni, author of the Angelology series, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and winner of the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. A New York Times, USA Today, internationally bestselling novelist, her work has been translated into over 30 languages and has been chosen as one of the NYTBR Ten Best Books of the Year.