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Selma and Jeanne are best friends until Selma falls in love with Jeanne’s brother Mischa. But her passion is not love, it is life-threatening. Jeanne decides to save her friend, at any cost. 

»With gripping realism, Julia Malik reveals the intricate fabric of violence and how difficult it is to escape. Yet because this is literature, we as readers are ultimately rescued as well –and left happy.«
Marlene Streeruwitz

»Julia Malik writes precisely and authentically about the dynamics of violence that is all too often disguised as love. We must look, even if it is painful, in order to understand.« 
Christina Clemm

»You only realize how much this book has been missing once you resurface, because it sweeps you away so completely. It is told with such lucidity and intensity.« 
Daniela Dröscher

Jeanne, Mischa’s sister, is Selma’s best friend, until Selma suddenly belongs entirely to Mischa. When the dream of passionate love turns into a nightmare, Jeanne loads up the car and kidnaps Selma from a Berlin café. They remain in hiding until the day arrives when they get back in the car and drive to court.

Julia Malik uses literary language and compelling imagery to show how perpetrators lure their victims into a spiral of seduction, isolation, alienation, powerlessness, and shame. How destructive and perfidious passion, manipulation, and raw violence often go hand in hand.
I want you alive is a fast-paced, furious, and ultimately liberating chase that leads over bureaucratic hurdles, through humiliating interrogations, and into the gray zone between saving lives and violating boundaries. 
Throughout, the author never loses sight of her protagonists, their fierceness, their resistance, and their dignity.

Julia Malik, born in Berlin, went to the University of Music and Theater in Hamburg to study acting. This was followed by engagements at various theaters. She appears in film and television productions, most recently starring alongside Thomas Thieme and Robert Stadlober in the feature film LasVegas (2023), and is a member of the Berlin band Elementarstrategien. Her debut novel, Brauch Blau, was published by FVA in 2020.

Ayla wanted to prove to everyone that it is possible: children, a career, the perfect life. But what happens when the one friendship that held everything together turns out to be an abyss?

»Ayla could barely bring herself to say it out loud. But, and this was the truth: Victoria  had slipped out of her life, silently and cowardly. Silently and viciously. Silently and wrongly. Victoria’s absence from Ayla’s life now felt hostile.«

As different as the friends are, they are also inseparable: Victoria is the sun for Ayla –blonde, light-hearted, radiant. But Ayla wants to shine too – with top grades in her A-levels and a law degree. Yet at 42, with the birth of her fourth child, Ayla finds herself in not just a career crisis, but an existential one. Her first three children are blonde like her husband, the newborn has dark hair like herself. Ayla does not recognize it as her own, believing there has been a mix-up. Just now, when she needs her best friend more than ever, Victoria slips away from her. The more she looks into the reasons for the growing estrangement between them, the clearer it becomes to her: she is being betrayed. Ayla questions all her certainties – and risks losing everything.

In her debut novel, Fatma Mittler-Solak writes with intensity and grip about a woman who wants to prove herself to everyone: her Turkish parents, her colleagues, her husband, her children, her best friend – and who, in the midst of the roles she tries to overfulfil, loses herself. The moment her self-image finally begins to crumble, she is in danger of falling into an abyss. Was Victoria’s friendship a deception?

Fatma Mittler-Solak, born in Frankenthal in 1977, studied political science and educational science in Heidelberg. She is a TV presenter and writes the parenting column for the magazine Der Spiegel. Fatma Mittler-Solak lives in Heidelberg with her husband and three children. 

A gripping, intense, and, in its sensitivity, radically honest exploration of female friendship – about what we cling to and what is worth letting go of.
 
»Julia Rothenburg takes us into the dark heart of destructive friendships and shows how these relationships shape us for a lifetime.« Julia Wolf 
 
»A novel about the pull of friendship, told with such unflinching honesty that the story lingers long after you finish reading.« Mascha Unterlehberg
 
Alice is calling it quits. Some would say, »It’s nothing, really«. Christin will surely say that in a moment. But after what happened with Yv – it’s too much. Alice hasn’t been working at the kindergarten in Berlin for very long, and she takes an instant liking to her colleague Christin. Sticky hands, nervous parents, children’s tears – it brings them closer than Alice would like. She has to end it before it reopens old wounds, if it isn’t already too late. It hasn’t been long since the last time a friendship became too tight for Alice. The move to Berlin, her first job, and »the best roommates« ever: Mo, Reike, and Yv. But what began as an intense friendship quickly escalated. To allow herself to be close to someone again, overcome her fears, and heal, Alice must stand up for herself. But that’s easier said than done …
 
Julia Rothenburg writes about friendships in a way rarely seen before: brutally honest, openly vulnerable, and touching in a raw way. She explores how valuable, formative, and overpowering these bonds can be, but also how deep the wounds run when trust is betrayed.
 
 
Julia Rothenburg was born in Berlin in 1990. She studied sociology and political science in Freiburg and Berlin. In 2017, her debut novel Koslik ist krank was published by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt; she received the Retzhof Prize for Young Literature in 2015 for its manuscript. Her second book, hell/dunkel, followed in 2019, also published by FVA. In the same year, she also received the Annual Scholarship for Literature from the State of Baden-Württemberg. Her third novel, Mond über Beton (FVA 2021), was awarded the Bayern2 Wortspiele Prize 2021 and the Meißner Literature Festival Prize 2021.

Fantasy is power when we understand it. And there is a way to rediscover it.

»A (S)Excursion through pop culture that’s not only great fun but also powerfully demonstrates just how political imagination is.«

Mareike Fallwickl

»This book is intelligent, feminist, stirring, and entertaining, while also being brilliantly written. Anyone who doesn’t read it is missing out.«
Samuel Benke

How do movies, advertising, pornography, songs, and comedy shape our ideas about sex? And why is it still so hard to talk openly about (sexual) fantasies? Bianca Nawrath explores how our fantasies are deeply rooted in pop culture – through interviews, storytelling, reflections, and practical impulses, she aims to break down the taboos surrounding desire and explores the question: What do our fantasies reveal about us, about our times, and about our freedom? As everything becomes faster, louder, and more digital, and old power structures persist, how does that affect our feelings, thoughts, and desires? And when does intimacy turn into alienation? Bianca Nawrath’s personal and social exploration of sexual fantasies focuses on the reconstruction of desire and fantasy through media, language, and emotional influences.

Bianca Nawrath is an author and actress. Born in Berlin in 1997, she appeared on camera for the first time at age 14 as the host of a youth program. She made her acting debut in 2018 and has since performed alongside Judi Dench, Jürgen Vogel, and Katharina Thalbach. In 2021, her first novel, Iss das jetzt, wenn du mich liebst, was published, followed by the novel Wenn ich dir jetzt recht gebe, liegen wir beide falsch (2023). In the fall of 2025, her latest novel Schöne Scham was published by FVA. Bianca Nawrath lives and works in Berlin. 

Surprising and compelling until the very last page, Johann Reißer tells the extraordinary story of Max Duttenhofer, the beginnings of the German armaments industry, and the hopes, desires, and abysses behind it. A gripping, multi-voiced family and epochal novel that stretches a narrative arc from the late 19th century to the 21st.

»Max Duttenhofer’s existence has almost faded into oblivion, although he was one of the most powerful men in the German Empire – and one of its most enigmatic.« Der Spiegel

In the Black Forest town everyone knows the cheeky Max, who would rather hang around the old gunpowder mill than work in his parents’ pharmacy. No one suspects that this ambitious boy will one day take over the mill and build an internationally operating corporation in just a few years. His smokeless powder revolutionizes warfare and makes him one of the most powerful men in the Empire, brokering deals with Bismarck and Krupp and selling his powder all the way to Japan. Yet not everyone welcomes the social changes brought by industrialization and nationalism. The arms race erupts into the First World War, experienced by his illegitimate granddaughter Rosa as a worker in the gunpowder factory. Life-changing events turn her into a fighter against militarism…

This multi-voiced historical and family novel spans the 19th to the 21st century, traversing locations such as Rottweil, Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Berlin. Gripping to the last page, it follows the drive for acceleration and expansion in modernity and its transformation into destruction and violence, revealing the growing social divides, mounting tensions, and political radicalization.

Johann Reißer, born in 1979 in Regensburg, earned his doctorate with a thesis on archaeology and sampling in poetry. He has performed pieces in German- and English-speaking countries, and in 2010 received the jury prize at the 100 Grad Theater Festival in Berlin. He received the Berlin Senate Scholarship for the manuscript of his debut novel Pulver. Reißer teaches philosophy and creative writing and lives in Berlin.

With psychological precision and a language that shimmers like a painting, Stauffer explores the fragility of human relationships in a world where virtuality and reality blend into one another.

»From the very first page, Verena Stauffer takes us on the love journey of an artist who, with every step, packs up and transforms a piece of the world. After reading, your own world will remain changed forever – more colorful, richer, and deeper.« Yevgeniy Breyger

»Verena Stauffer does not shy away from taboos. The language is rich, following in a tradition that stretches from Charles Baudelaire to Arthur Schnitzler, Else Laske-Schüler, and the French writer Colette. And the novel's motifs are sophisticated and precisely interwoven. The transition between the analog and digital worlds is described in a reflective manner.« SWR

Ava is an artist living a precarious existence. She is trying to free herself from an unhappy relationship, and in her search for security she becomes entangled in a love triangle between a young, attractive doctor and the reality-shy E. A play of vibrating enchantment and shattering twists unfolds – of chasing and being chased, of fulfilment and withdrawal, of life and death. A growing mistrust spreads through her mind: Who is the father of her child – is she really pregnant? Has her lover been murdered? She almost loses herself in the constant shifting between virtual and real life, finding herself drawn into a role-playing game, a virtual world in which she seems to be fighting against herself. Yet through her unwavering faith in painting, in color, in friendship, and in goodness, she creates a new, grand painting and senses that she had to experience life in order to reconnect with herself and her art.

With her unique, award-winning language, Verena Stauffer dives into the digital world and skillfully blurs it with reality in unpredictable ways.

Verena Stauffer, born in 1978 in Kirchdorf an der Krems, Upper Austria, published her debut novel Orchis in 2018, which was nominated for the Alpha Literature Prize, the Hotlist of Independents, and the Blogger Debut Prize. She has twice been nominated for the Austrian Book Prize: with Ousia (published by Kookbooks) and with her latest poetry collection Kiki Beach. In 2025 she read at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt and in 2026 she received the George Saiko Travel Grant. Stauffer lives in Vienna.

»Beyond its psychological depth, the novel serves as a powerful allegory for German reunification. Hauser, whose previous work was nominated for the German Book Prize, expertly captures the psychological mood, rather than just the physical or economic transition of the former East. (…) a sophisticated, demanding, and rewarding work.«

New Books in German

»This is a book about violence and motherhood, devotion and humiliation. Franziska Hauser gently places a girl growing into a woman among it all – I am allowed to grow and heal with Irma.« Maren Wurster

Having fled to the city to escape her mother, young Irma finds herself stranded outside a theatre. That she might soon stand on its stage is something she never dared to hope for. Life backstage is exhilarating, sometimes glamorous, yet the theatre’s microcosm uncannily resembles the alternative communal settlement in which Irma grew up without a father. There is the celebrated actress Blanda, Helene, who takes Irma in, and the eccentric director Taron Capla, who offers her a life-changing opportunity.

As Irma stumbles through the dramas on and behind the stage, memories begin to catch up with her. The most painful are those of her mother: her warmth, her radiance, and her cold contempt. When Irma starts delivering her lines the way her mother once spoke, she is met with applause from all sides. And yet it becomes clear that she can no longer go on merely performing her life. To survive, she must break the spell.

With sharp wit and emotional clarity, Franziska Hauser writes about what binds and repels mothers and daughters, individuals and communities, freedom and dependency – and about the beautiful and terrible small things in between. At the End of Small Things is a novel about wounds that never fully heal, and about the quiet miracles that nonetheless occur.

Franziska Hauser was born in Berlin-Pankow in 1975. She studied at the Weißensee Academy of Art and Design and at Ostkreuz School of Photography. Her debut novel Sommerdreieck was followed by Die Gewitterschwimmerin (2018), which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. After Die Glasschwestern and Keine von ihnen, she co-edited the widely acclaimed anthology Ost*West*frau* (FVA, spring 2025) together with Maren Wurster. Franziska Hauser has two children and lives partly in Berlin.

November 1989: the Wall falls, and five young people race to Berlin in a rickety Audi to witness history firsthand. Lanfermann’s posthumously published novel captures the spirit of a generation – with all its euphoria, hopes, and the first cracks in the dream of friendship and unity.

»Mad Times hits you unexpectedly. Because a friendship like this is heartbreaking. Because Mechthild Lanfermann writes compellingly about a time that set the course for our present.« Annegret Liepold

»That’s mad!« says a guy with a Walkman, while perm hairstyles, denim jackets and babies being passed over the Wall flicker across the screen. In Eliza’s dormitory in the North Frisian town, excitement runs high. Suddenly a horn blares, and Jo, his silent friend Thies, and Ava with a red scarf in her short blonde hair wave Eliza into the Audi. »Where are we going?« someone asks, grinning crookedly. »Well, to Berlin!«

In the fever of a time when the old is torn down and something new begins, Eliza, Ava, Maria, Jo, and Thies come together – and for the first time Eliza feels part of something. But just as the utopia of unity quickly shows its first cracks, Ava, the dazzling center of their friendship, sinks deeper into crisis. Jo becomes overwhelmed, Thies is consumed by his secret love for Eliza, and Eliza herself increasingly questions what is considered »normal.«

With sharp insight and warm humor, Mechthild Lanfermann tells the story of a time when everything still seemed possible: of a newly reunited country, a budding friendship, and the realization that what ultimately defines us is also the most fleeting. A moving novel about friendship, loss, and the belief in new beginnings.

Mechthild Lanfermann, born in 1969 in Lower Saxony, died in 2024 in Berlin, studied theatre studies, German literature and philosophy in Bochum, Paris and Cologne, later journalism in Hanover. She worked as a radio journalist at various public broadcasting institutions and spent over ten years on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She published five novels, including the crime series featuring the fictional Berlin journalist Emma Vonderwehr, for which she was nominated for the Glauser Prize.

»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.

A dramatic welfare novel – »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.