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DIEBE DES LICHTS de Philipp Blom

The brilliant historical novel about murder, revenge, love, loyalty and betrayal, set in war-torn sixteenth-century Europe.

DIEBE DES LICHTS
(The Light-Thieves)
by Philipp Blom
Blessing/PRH Germany, October 2022

Sander has been on the run ever since 1572, when he saw his father murdered at the hands of the Spanish invaders in Flanders. He meets a master who teaches him how to paint flowers, while his brother Hugo, who hasn’t spoken a word since their parents’ death, mixes the paints for him. But Hugo is as unreliable and quick to anger as he is gentle, and when he commits a violent crime, he and Sander have to flee. They find refuge in an artist’s studio in Rome, witness the Pope’s dissipation, are caught up in the intrigues proliferating in the Neapolitan cardinal’s palace, and – both in their own special way – experience the joy of forbidden love. In the course of their adventures, Sander repeatedly finds a way out of seemingly hopeless situations …
A major new novel that vividly portrays the Renaissance and its key players, including Giordano Bruno, Caravaggio and high-ranking clerics.

Philipp Blom, born in 1970, studied philosophy, history and Judaism in Vienna and Oxford, and obtained his PhD from Oxford with a thesis on the reception of Nietzsche. He is the author of bestselling history books including « The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900–1914 » (2009) and « Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918–1938 » (2014), and has won the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Literature and the NDR Kultur Prize for Non-Fiction. DIEBE DES LICHTS is his first work of historical fiction.

MADAME EXUPÉRY UND DIE STERNE DES HIMMELS de Sophie Villard

With him, her dreams learned to fly. But they came too close to the stars.

MADAME EXUPÉRY UND DIE STERNE DES HIMMELS
(Madame Exupéry and the Starry Skies)
by Sophie Villard
Penguin Germany, September 2021

Paris, 1930. When the young artist Consuelo meets Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at a party, it’s love at first sight. The temperamental Salvadorean becomes the muse of the enigmatic pilot, who would much rather be writing and drawing than flying planes.
His deep love for her inspired « The Little Prince »: Consuelo is the beloved rose that the prince protects with a glass globe, and which is always in his thoughts no matter where his travels take him.
The book made Antoine world-famous, but life by his side was not easy. Consuelo had to deal with his unfaithfulness, and fought hard to establish herself as an artist in her own right – until 1944, when Antoine took off on his fateful flight across the Mediterranean …

Sophie Villard is the pen name of a successful German author. She studied journalism and political science, and lives near Dresden with her family. Her novel about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim was a Spiegel bestseller, and her new book as well is about another inspiring and important female figure: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wife and muse Consuelo, to whom we owe the story of the Little Prince.

WENN DIE HOFFNUNG ERWACHT de Lilli Beck

He makes her a promise: he will love her forever and always be there for her. But then everything changes… The new historical novel by bestselling author Lilli Beck.

WENN DIE HOFFNUNG ERWACHT
(When Hope Awakens)
by Lilli Beck
Blanvalet/PRH Germany, June 2021

Germany, 1947. Nora’s friend invites her to a German-American New Year’s Eve party, where she’s swept off her feet by the handsome US officer William. Nora tries long and hard to hide her passionate affair from her father, but when she becomes pregnant and William is ordered back to the US she has no choice but to confess. Her father is beside himself, but has a solution: a banker friend of his offers to marry Nora and cover the family’s debts. Nora has no intention of agreeing to the plan. She leaves town with her son under cover of night and takes the train to Munich, where she meets a feverish and confused young woman in the street. Nora walks Celia home – to the villa of the wealthy Wagners, who mistake Nora’’s baby for Celia’s son. It’s a fatal misunderstanding, but one that Nora does nothing to dispel…

Lilli Beck trained as a wholesaler. In 1968 she went to live in Munich, where she was discovered by a model agent in the popular disco Blow up. She spent ten years working for magazines such as Brigitte, Burda-Moden and TWEN and was a Pirelli bonnet mascot. WENN DIE HOFFNUNG ERWACHT is her fourth historical novel for Blanvalet.

DIE REBELLIN UND DER DIEB de Jan-Philipp Sendker

A moving story about a forbidden love, the courage of despair and humanity in the face of disaster.

DIE REBELLIN UND DER DIEB
(The Rebel Girl and the Thief)
by Jan-Philipp Sendker
Blessing/PRH Germany, August 2021

18-year-old Niri, his parents and siblings have a modest but secure existence as servants in the villa of a wealthy family. Until the pandemic comes, Niri’s entire family is laid off and stares into the abyss of deepest poverty.
The previously well-behaved monastic student does not want to wait for the mercy of an indifferent government and, in the face of growing hardship, rebels against his father’s resignation to fate. Sneaking past the patrols at night through a sealed-off city, he returns to the villa to get what the family needs to survive. Waiting for him there is his childhood friend Mary, who not only gives him food, but has a larger plan that will change the lives of the town and the two of them forever.
The universal story of two lovers from different worlds who learn what matters in the face of disaster: Courage to resist, will to change, and unconditional trust in each other.

Jan-Philipp Sendker, born in 1960, was the US correspondent for Stern magazine from 1990 to 1995, and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. His first novel, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats and his other books are international best sellers. He lives in Potsdam with his family.

MIRIAM de Deborah Feldman

The first novel by the bestselling author of Unorthodox, and the first book Deborah Feldman is writing in German.

MIRIAM
by Deborah Feldman
Luchterhand/PRH Germany, August 2021

© Alexa VachonSet in Antwerpen, New York and Jerusalem. Miriam is the only daughter of the famous Antwerpen diomand trader Volvi Halpern, and the family’s hopes are set on her: By marrying her off to a rich New Yorker, they are hoping to save the family business. But Miriam fights their decision. Ever since her birth she carries the burden of an unusual, transcendent old knowledge, she hears voices, she has visions that, like memories from a distant past, burst into her presence. Torn between her family’s expectations and the voices of the past, she is trying to find out what defines her, who she is, and which path she wants to take.

Deborah Feldman is an American-born German writer living in Berlin, Germany. Her 2012 autobiography, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, tells the story of her escape from an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, New York, and was the basis of the 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox.