Rightslist

»Sophia Klink writes about majestic bears and volcanoes, but she also writes about a nature that is invisible to the naked eye, about plankton, proteins, hormones, and she finds a visually powerful language for it.« Marion Poschmann
 
»Sophia Klink's language is like a microscope that magnifies and sharpens the connections in life. Anyone who has read this book will see the world and its delicate, endangered riches in a different light.« Isabelle Lehn
 
»A compelling, evocative debut novel« New Books in German
 

Anna, a biologist at the Russian research station on Kurile Lake in Kamchatka, spends her summers studying salmon, phytoplankton, and water samples amidst volcanoes and bears. With climate change endangering the salmon population, her team must decide whether to add phosphate fertilizers to the lake. Although Anna cherishes the beauty of Kurilskoye and its people, including Vova, Yulia, and her boss Feodor, she fears that human intervention may disrupt the delicate balance of nature. Yet, without action, the lake will never be the same. As the summer ends, they must make their choice.
 
In Sophia Klink’s debut novel, the rational language of science is overlaid with an emotionally charged observation of nature – a poetic lens through which the microsystem of Kurile Lake appears magnified, and the global phenomenon of climate change becomes tangible. Thanks to Klink’s perception-shaping language and psychologically compelling character dynamics, Kurile Lake is a literary adventure, a captivating example of nature writing that sharpens our awareness of the threats facing our planet, the ambivalence of science and the beauty of nature.
 

Sophia Klink (b. 1993, Munich) studied biology and wrote her doctoral thesis on the symbiosis between bacteria and plants. Her nature writing was awarded the Wolfgang Weyrauch Advancement Award and has been supported through fellowships from the British Council and the Foundation for Art and Nature. Klink has been a finalist of ‘open mike’ and a fellow at the Roger Willemsen Foundation, the Adalbert Stifter Association and Villa Sarkia in Finland. An extract from her novel Kurile Lake was shortlisted for the W. G. Sebald Prize.

»Witches Don’t Feel Ashamed moves with a delicate sensitivity through what lies between people: desire, insecurity, intimacy, origin, body. It doesn’t offer solutions, but rather contradictions – and in the very places where language often falters, it provides a tone that remains both tender and clear.« Sophia Fritz
 
»Bianca Nawrath strikes a nerve. She dares to do a lot, and it feels as though she's looking you straight in the eye while doing it.« Judith Poznan
 
»To all the Christians out there who want to know what female desire and fantasy might look like. Ask about it. Or at least read this book!« Anton Weil
 

Two Couples, One Single Friend, A Baltic Weekend – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
 
Four friends head to the Baltic Sea for a weekend getaway, and for the first time, Ola joins them. Ola is single, attracted to both women and men, and brings along a biography of Hildegard von Bingen. For Amalia's boyfriend Christian, Ola’s feminist remarks are nothing short of a disaster. The first evening threatens to become a fiasco, revolving around the question of who can light the grill and a conversation about female masturbation. The second couple, Kata and Lenny, are increasingly unsettled by Christian's behavior, but are mostly preoccupied with their own suppressed conflicts. The situation escalates when Amalia and Ola suddenly disappear without a trace.

How can one free oneself from a self-destructive relationship, and when does non-interference become complicity? Bianca Nawrath demonstrates a keen eye for the gray areas of friendship and love, for the subtle workings of shame and guilt. With sharp dialogue, psychological tension, and believable characters, she challenges traditional power structures and leads her readers through many, often highly amusing, detours to the realization of how valuable female solidarity truly is.
 
 
Bianca Nawrath, born in 1997 in Berlin, is an author and actress with Polish roots. At the age of 14, she appeared in front of the camera for the first time as the host of a youth program. In 2018, she made her acting debut and has since appeared alongside stars such as Judi Dench, Jürgen Vogel, and Christian Ulmen. In 2021, she released her first novel, Iss das jetzt, wenn du mich liebst, followed by Wenn ich dir jetzt recht gebe, liegen wir beide falsch in 2022. Bianca Nawrath lives and works in Berlin.

»A stand against war and a proclamation of love. This novel is a blessing to be cherished.«
Saša Stanišić 
 
»The day Dada disappeared, I lost everything. To understand what happened between us back then, in the ruins, I need to start from the beginning. I have to remember things I want to forget, I have to go back, back to the war and yet further back. Long before the loneliness took over, to a time when we believed nothing could ever separate us.«
 
With haunting power and breathtaking pace, Vernesa Berbo recounts the fate of Dada and Dijana in 1990’s Sarajevo. A captivating narrative about the bond between two sisters, about love, friendship and the will to survive.
 
When asked why he calls Dijana ›Son‹, her father only smiles mysteriously as if he knows something about his daughter that sooner or later everyone will discover. Dijana is self-confident and hot-blooded, but above all she is the protector of her younger sister. Sensitive and intelligent Dada comes into the world during the freezing winter of 1976, like a snowflake that floats into the room just before the window slams shut. From the onset of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 it becomes clear that it is up-to Dijana to protect and fend for her sister and the rest of the family. While Dijana faces every challenge with determination, Dada clings onto Mirza, her first love, until disastrous events threaten to take everything away from the sisters.
 
This book is a rare gem – tender, yet uncompromising, a sweeping narrative about war and love against all odds. Vernesa Berbo lived through the siege of Sarajevo, and she transports us to the heart of the reality of a war that still receives too little attention – the fate of women, their deep psychological wounds, but also their great inner strength. A haunting novel of breathless suspense about the love of two sisters in dark times.
 

Vernesa Berbo was born in Priboj, in the former Yugoslavia. She studied acting at the State Academy of Dramatic Art in Sarajevo. In 1993 she arrived in Berlin as a war refugee. Since 1994 she has worked as an actress, musician and playwright at various theatres in Germany, including the Maxim Gorki Theatre, Thalia Theatre and the Deutsches Theater. Son and Snowflake is her debut novel. Vernesa Berbo lives in Berlin.

»Money is the only weight that lifts you.«
 
»A text like a machine. Breathless to read. With steely courage. Magnificent and bitter.« Andreas Maier
 

At the supermarket checkout, Manfred Gruber realizes: the welfare office hasn’t transferred his benefits. When his card payment is declined yet again, a flush of shame creeps into his face. It’s a cold, rainy April day, and without money he has no choice but to walk the long stretch along the Austrian highway to confront the officials. He has met every requirement, sent off every hopeless job application, endured the miserable training courses and unpaid trial shifts. He has, damn it, fulfilled his obligation to make an effort — they can’t touch him. But he’s wrong.
 
With gripping intensity, Sandra Weihs depicts the desperate struggle of a man abandoned by the welfare system. Her razor-sharp social observations, paired with a keen humor in which flashes of Bernhardian irony gleam through, refuse to let go of the reader — a novel that dismantles prejudice and restores to its protagonist the one thing he desires most: dignity. An urgent novel for our times, it looks precisely where society is quickest to avert its gaze.
 
 
Sandra Weihs, born in 1983 in Klagenfurt, studied Social Work in Vienna and now lives in Upper Austria. In 2015, she received the Jürgen Ponto Prize for the best German-language debut for her novel Das grenzenlose Und (FVA, 2015). She has been awarded several fellowships and grants, most recently the Project Grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport for her manuscript Bemühungspflicht.

»A wise and tender novel that asks what family truly means — skillfully crafted, clear, poetic, and compelling. And, with remarkable sensitivity, this gifted author has captured the heart of the Balkans and brought it into German.« Antonia Bontscheva
 
 
From Germany to Mostar, a journey into loss, courage, and the light of Herzegovina.
 
»One day we’ll come back, and then we’ll jump.« This was the promise a mother and daughter made to each other on the Old Bridge in Mostar — that heartbreakingly beautiful city with its painful history, the place where the mother had last been truly happy. But then, unexpectedly, Elise dies, and her daughter Rosa, in her mid-twenties, finds herself amid the wreckage of a fractured family history. Determined to keep the promise they once made, Rosa sets out on a journey through Eastern Europe, tracing the fault lines in her mother’s tumultuous life. Her adventure takes an unforeseen turn when she meets Emma, who is traveling to Mostar for entirely different — yet equally existential — reasons.
 
One Day We’ll Jump is a story of an intense mother–daughter bond and a search for the meaning of family — a wonderfully moving novel about grief, solace, and love in all its colors.
 
 
Gianna Lange, born in 1988 in Bremen, studied Journalism and Transnational Literary Studies in Bremen and London. She is a founding member of the poetry collective gabrieleschreibtgedichte, the young literature collective Kollit, and an editorial member of the literary magazine Koller. For the opening pages of her manuscript One Day We’ll Jump, she was awarded the Bremen Authors’ Grant. She lives in Bremen and works at the concert hall ›Die Glocke‹ as well as at the ›Musikfest Bremen‹.

»A novel about friendship, trust, and the honest examination of one’s own motives. This story stayed with me for a long time after I finished reading it.« Laura Beck, Bayerischer Rundfunk
 
»An invigorating debut with precise, incisive dialogue that masterfully illuminates the complexity of human relationships.« Demian Lienhard
 
An escape, an unequal friendship, a betrayal – an intense, original novel about global issues, where its light-footed prose and witty charm make it all the clearer: simple answers can’t be trusted.
 
Tom and Farid play table tennis, ride skateboards, swim in the Isar: They are friends. At the beginning of their friendship was a mentorship, which Tom, a PhD student in physics, had taken on for sixteen-year-old Farid, who had fled from Quetta. Together with Laura, Tom’s girlfriend, they form an unusual trio – until Farid makes a risky decision. Amid the unfolding events, Tom is confronted with questions: about Laura's supposed loyalty, his own feelings and aspirations, and, not least, about Farid’s silence regarding the harrowing experiences of his flight.
 
In his debut novel, Christian Mitzenmacher not only approaches major social issues like flight and the treatment of refugees, but he also tackles the problem of how, and from which perspective, these topics can be told. He doesn’t offer simple answers, but instead presents a tapestry of incisive questions, unexpected twists, unforgettable characters, and clever dialogue, all wrapped in a surprisingly light, often even humorous prose.
 

Christian Mitzenmacher was born in 1986 and grew up in Bad Buchau, Germany. A mathematician by training, he conducted research at the Technical University of Munich and at the M.I.T. in Cambridge, earning his doctorate in Operations Research. He was a fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Writing (2014), a finalist at the 24th ›open mike‹ (2016), and a fellow of the Prose Workshop of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (2019). He lives in Berlin.

»Hannes Köhler has created fascinating characters in David and Luisa: complex, contradictory, clever. I fell more in love with them – and their love – with every page. A great text that I could not escape!« Julia Wolf
 
»Hannes Köhler is a truthful and tender storyteller.« Daniela Dröscher
 
»Ten Pictures of a Love is an accomplished novel that speaks to contemporary debates around gender roles, motherhood, and masculine identity. Hannes Köhler’s charming love story will resonate with readers of David Nicholl’s One Day and Benedict Wells’ The End of Loneliness.« New Books in German
 

David and Luisa meet for the first time on the island of Milos, spend a night together, and then go their separate ways. Years later, they unexpectedly cross paths again, this time choosing to stay together. Luisa brings her daughter Ronja from a previous relationship into their lives, and together, they form a patchwork family. As David embraces his role as a father, he grows closer to Ronja, but his deepening desire to have a child of his own becomes a source of tension between them …
 
The concept of a one true love: is it an idea that still makes sense today? And if it is, what might this great love look like, if it is one that isn't confined by traditional gender roles or romantic ideals? Ten Pictures of a Love follows such a love in our time – a love that's chaotic, a struggle between individuality and togetherness, complicated by age differences and past relationships. The novel unfolds in ten non-chronological "pictures," each offering a glimpse into the evolution of their relationship. Hannes Köhler examines the complexities of modern love, its risks, and the constant process of reinvention. A raw and unflinching portrayal of family, it captures both the struggles and beauty of a love that must continually adapt and redefine itself.
 

Hannes Köhler, born in 1982 in Hamburg, lives as a freelance author and translator in Berlin. He participated in the prose workshop at the Literary Colloquium Berlin, the Goldschmidt Program for German-French literary translation, and received the Döblin Grant by the Academy of Arts for his work on Ten Pictures of a Love. His highly successful novel One Possible Life (2018) won the price for best family novel of the year by the Ravensburger foundation, it was followed by Götterfunken in 2021. 

»Elsa Koester shows how fascism takes root today. Her book hums with energy, pulling you in. It doesn’t explain why you have to get involved, it makes you feel it. That’s painful, but necessary to grasp the danger.« Daniel Schulz, Author and Journalist

Nana has never been to Saxony before. But now there’s an election coming up, and she’s headed to a town on the German state’s distant edge, the land of wolves, to stop a far-right candidate from becoming mayor.

Nana arrives in Grenzlitz, a town on the outskirts of Saxony, that is heated by the election campaign, filled with returning women, entrepreneurs, and motherless East Germans who were never integrated into this republic by their parents. As a campaign coach, she aims to support Katja Stötzel, the candidate for the eco-progressive Greens. But she’s kept at arm’s length. Instead, she finds understanding with Falk Schlosser, a man from the far-right. In the former East Germany, Nana reconnects with the anger and despair she’s buried for years, frustrated by a society that’s pushed her to the margins. As tensions escalate and candidate Katja faces threats, and everything begins to spiral out of control, Nana must make a choice: Whose side is she really on? Who truly stands for humanity?

In the Land of Wolves is a raw, authentic portrayal of rising fascism in a small town in Eastern Germany. It’s less about party politics and more about the personal battles for recognition and hope, where the wounds of the past thirty years – bitterness, frustration, and hypocrisy – become weapons.

Elsa Koester was born in Berlin in 1984 to a French Pied-Noir mother with a Tunisian colonial background and a North German father with a history of American emigration. She still lives in Berlin, working as a political journalist and Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the weekly newspaper »Der Freitag«. Revived debates on colonialism, identity, and homeland inspired her successful debut novel Couscous mit Zimt (FVA, 2020), where she drew from her diverse cultural identity and experience as both a journalist and activist.

»Laura Vogt vividly, and through shifting perspectives, explores what freedom and dependency can mean in the 21st century. The Reclining Woman is a nuanced, true-to-life novel about life choices, love, and friendship. The Swiss author allows her characters space to grow and evolve.« Martina Läubli, NZZ Books on Sunday

What does freedom mean? What about responsibility? What shapes us, and what do we hope to pass on to others? In her third novel, Laura Vogt delves deeply into the emotional lives of her characters – women in their thirties – and shows us their strengths and weaknesses, their disappointments and hopes. This is a vibrant, life-affirming novel that vividly illustrates how individualism, motherhood, and self-determination must continually be renegotiated.

Romi, short for Romina, is expecting her second child, and recently a second man has also arrived in her life. Szibilla finds the idea of bringing children into the world fundamentally irresponsible, and to her, Romi’s polyamory is just another way to become even more dependent on men. What binds them together is their best friend, Nora. But Nora escapes to her mother’s house in the Swiss Rhine Valley with her young daughter, lays right down in bed, and goes silent. Baffled, Romi and Szibilla travel to visit her, checking into a cheap wellness hotel nearby. While Romi worries about Nora, Szibilla believes this break is exactly what Nora needs to reconnect with herself. Over five days of heated discussions about life choices, the rift between Romi and Szibilla deepens – until Nora finally breaks her silence.

Laura Vogt, born in 1989 in Teufen, Switzerland, studied cultural studies in Lucerne and literary writing in Biel. Her debut novel, So einfach war es also zu gehen (2016), earned her invitations to the Solothurn Literature Days and PROSANOVA – Festival for Young Literature. In 2020, her second novel, Was uns betrifft, was translated into English. In addition to prose, she also writes poetry, plays, and journalistic texts, and works as a live interpreter and mentor. She lives with her family in eastern Switzerland.

»A suspenseful and highly psychological read, it paints portraits of three relationships between women of different generations, examining themes of female
desire, alienation and social expectation. (…) While comparisons could be drawn with Dorothy Bussy and Michelle Tea, Landfried is a distinctive new voice in German literature. Relatable, nuanced and compelling, ›Pasteurgasse 4, täglich‹ offers a fresh and timely addition
to the growing body of queer narratives.« New Books in German
 
»Andrea Landfried's narratively and stylistically powerful recordings of relationships – an encounter with love as a feverish, tumbling search for oneself, haunting, confounding, touching.« Bernhard Schlink
 
 
A young singer in Vienna falls in love with Ruth, a married photographer. Every day, before Ruth picks up her daughter from school, they share exactly two-and-a-half hours together, for two years. At the beginning, Ruth had warned her: the only and at the same time most important thing she could promise her was that she would not deceive her.
 
A woman accompanies her husband on his research fellowship in California. There she meets the much older Angela. Despite the many years and kilometers that separate them, a fragile erotic closeness develops between them.
 
Sarah falls in love with her psychotherapist. As Sarah's behavior becomes more and more obsessive, her therapist has her committed against her will, and a true psychiatric journey to hell begins. During a visit to the sanatorium, she is told, »And now you're going to have a great time.«
 
Andrea Landfried portrays three variations of female desire, each simmering with rebellion against social constraints, accepted psychological patterns, and role expectations. These women's longing to be truly seen and recognized triumphs again and again over fears of falling outside the norms and being socially ostracized. They take the risk of revealing themselves and feeling everything – one of the greatest risks one can take.
 
 
Andrea Landfried, born in 1976, lives with her children in Heidelberg. She studied law in Berlin and Oxford, among other places, and is currently the head of a foundation.

»No punk she knew would have tolerated that. Never. There had been a code of honor in the scene, despite everything. Red lines uncrossed. Jackass and Butt-Head: always. Nazis and child molesters: never.«
 
A group of aging punks get caught up in their past – a fast-paced rocking-rollercoaster of a novel, accompanied by the soundtrack of a vibrant youth movement
 
The smell of stage smoke and sweat, booming bass, glaring neon lights and squatted houses – Bey misses all of that deeply. Before the birth of her son, the former bassist of an avant-garde punk band couldn’t have imagined living a traditional, bourgeois life – now she’s stuck on the outskirts of Amsterdam, surrounded by well-to-do mothers and no late-adolescent excesses in sight. Suddenly, the arrival of a chalk-white envelope throws her daily routine out of step: her ex-boyfriend Iggy has died. Bey sets off to Berlin for the funeral, where she finds an old audio recording among Iggy’s belongings that makes her doubt the circumstances of his death. Her investigations are met with resistance from the rest of the old punks who knew him, but lead nonetheless to incriminating evidence. When Karina, Bey’s missing nemesis, unexpectedly appears on the scene, a breathless race for cassette tape begins and a monstrous truth is revealed that shatters everything Bey and her old friends ever believed.
 
Yasmin Sibai’s debut novel takes place in the dark basement clubs of the nineties and secret hacker salons of the two-thousands; it roams through gentrified urban landscapes and penetrates into the black heart of a lively subculture, venting its anger with hard beats towards post-war conservatism, capitalism and commerce. In »PUNKED«, Sibai lets a utopia implode and puts her protagonist on the trail of a criminal case that sheds new light on her punk past.
 

Yasmin Sibai was born in northern Germany in 1976 and has since moved thirty-two times. In the eighties and nineties of the last millennium she was the singer and frontwoman of a rather insignificant avant-garde punk band, with whom she toured the smallest bars and clubs in the world for months. She has lived in Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, New York and Amsterdam, worked as an organic farmer, truck driver, freelance architect, DJane and artist. She lives with her family in Frankfurt a/M and has no plans to move in the near future.
 

Awarded the Robert Gernhardt Prize and the Licher Literature Prize

In ›Old Girls‹, Julia Wolf lets three generations of women have their say – and sketches a panorama of female life in the Federal Republic that hasn’t been seen before in contemporary German literature.
 

»Julia Wolf’s ›Old Girls‹ resists easy categorisation and refuses to jump on any contemporary literary bandwagons. Its mixture of different literary modes is accessible, inventive and often amusing. Wolf has a knack for hitting all the right generational notes while developing distinct characters and friendships.« New Books in German

»›Old Girls‹ has everything you could want from a contemporary German-language novel: The failure of a petty-bourgeois family, silence, and the experiences of powerlessness in German post-war history, all told as a kaleidoscopic exploration of female subjectivity. Julia Wolf writes a history of consciousness, creating a picture of the postwar milieu that has not been seen before.« Laudatio for the Robert Gernhardt Prize

It's always the daughters who ask! The three ›girls from East Prussia‹, Anni, Else and Hannelore, are asked to model for a photography campaign for their senior citizens’ residence. While Germany's Next Topmodel plays on television, these three women in their mid-nineties negotiate what they want to say about their lives – and what not.

In the car on the way to Poland, Gudrun sends a voice message. She wants her niece to know about her grandmother’s death. But she digresses, talks about her escape at the end of the war, her childhood in the 1950s. Suddenly it becomes clear: she has something she wants to confess.

Undine, Jenny and Thao spend a weekend in Berlin before Jenny has her first child. Along with memories of their childhood and youth in the 1980s and 1990s, social differences come to light again. As they reevaluate their life choices, the contractions begin.

Written in three parts – »Marjellchen,« »New Home, Old House« and »MILF« – Julia Wolf portrays three generations of women, tracing the wounds, values, and experiences of wartime. With this novel, she contributes an important narrative of female subjectivity to German post-war history, opening our eyes to where we come from, where we are going, what we should take with us, and what we should let go.

Julia Wolf is an author and translator. Her debut »Alles ist Jetzt« (FVA 2015) was followed by the novel »Walter Nowak bleibt liegen« (FVA 2017), which won the 3sat Prize and the Nicolas Born Debut Prize, and was nominated for the German Book Prize 2017. She received the Robert Gernhardt Prize and the Licher Literature Prize for »Old Girls«. As part of the author collective »Writing with CARE/RAGE,« Julia Wolf has worked on the topic of care work and artistic production. She lives with her family in Leipzig.