Rightslist

The new novel by the internationally bestselling author of »The Eighth Life (For Brilka)«

»The Lack of Light is a novel that thrills you, the kind you can't put down. Nino Haratischwili grips you from the first page with an intensity that only great writers can achieve.« Armando Lucas Correa, author of the internationally bestselling The German Girl 
 
»Readers will find The Lack of Light irresistible.« Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
Lack Of Light is the story of four outstanding women bound in absolute friendship during their adolescence in post-soviet Tbilisi during the 90ies, fighting for their right for a future and their right to love – and trying to save their friendship after the harrowing death of one of them.
 
They are four, as different as can be: the romantic Nene, the clever outsider Ira, the idealistic Dina, and the sensitive Keto. Inseparable since childhood, they grow up together in an old Tiblisi courtyard, in Georgia, at a time when the Soviet Union is crumbling and the future of their country is in question. Each in her own way experiences love, hope, and disappointment as local mob wars, romance, and civil war threaten to swallow up their worlds. Rising to challenges both personal and political —a first love that can only blossom in secret, violent street skirmishes, a ravaging drug epidemic—the four women’s friendship seems indestructible, until an unforgivable act of betrayal and a tragic death shatter their bond.
Decades later, the three survivors reunite at a major retrospective of their late friend’s photography. The pictures on display tell the story not only of their country but also of their friendship, and, confronted by them, Nene, Ira, and Keto relive their staggering loss. Then, unexpectedly, something new is glimpsed, and forgiveness seems within reach.

Like the International Booker Prize nominated The Eighth Life (For Brilka) before it, Nino Haratischwili’s The Lack of Light is an emotionally bold, decades-spanning epic in which to lose yourself, brought to life by the vibrant colors of Georgia's culture and its people. It is a glorious book readers will return to again and again.
 

Born in Tbilisi in 1983, Nino Haratischwili is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theatre director. She writes in German and is among the most acclaimed and widely-read authors of contemporary German literature. Her third novel, The Eighth Life (for Brilka) (FVA 2014), was translated into thirty languages and became an international bestseller. It won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Anna Seghers Prize, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. The Lack of Light (FVA 2022) is her most recent novel. Haratischwili lives in Berlin.

The international bestseller of the award-winning author: more than 1.5 million copies sold worldwide!

The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, nominated for the 2020 International Booker Prize

Sold to: Armenia (Antares), Bulgaria (Paradox Publishing), China (Xiron), Croatia (Fraktura), Czech Republic (Host), Denmark (Gutkind), English world rights (HarperVia), Estonia (Rahva Raamat), Finland (Aula & Co), France (Gallimard), Georgia (Intelekti), Hungary (Európa), Italy (Marsilio), Latvia (Zvaigzne), Lithuania (Alma Littera), Netherlands (Meridiaan), Norway (Aschehoug), Poland (Otwarte), Romania (Editura Trei), Russia (AST), Slovakia (Inaque), Slovenia (Mladinska knjiga), Spanish world rights (Alfaguara), Sweden (it-lit), Ukraine (Komora)
 
Film rights sold to:
The Ink Factory, London / L.A.

»Nino Haratischwili has proved herself as one of the most interesting and original writers of her generation«, New Books in German, US Jury Pick

»Heart-stopping, sublime. (...) The book concludes with a devastatingly brilliant announcement of hope.« The New York Times

»Harrowing, heartening and utterly engrossing epic novel.« The Guardian

The Eighth Life (For Brilka) is an epic family saga beginning with the Russian Revolution and swirling across a century, encompassing war, loss, love, ghosts, joy, massacres, tragedy – and a secret recipe for hot chocolate, which gives both salvation and misfortune over six generations.
 
At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste…
Stasia learns it from her Georgian father and takes it north to St. Petersburg with her husband Simon, at the center of the Russian Revolution. This is just the first of a series of grand, doomed romances that sweeten and sour the epic tale of the red century. Across years and distances, generation after generation hears echoes and sees reflections. A ballet dancer never reaches Paris, a singer longs for Vienna. Great characters and relationships come and go, the world shakes, and the reader savors a classic where you live, learn, be lost and found, and make lasting new friends.
 

Born in Tbilisi in 1983, Nino Haratischwili is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theatre director. She writes in German and is among the most acclaimed and widely-read authors of contemporary German literature. Her third novel, The Eighth Life (for Brilka) (FVA 2014), was translated into thirty languages and became an international bestseller. It won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Anna Seghers Prize, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. The Lack of Light (FVA 2022) is her most recent novel. Haratischwili lives in Berlin.
 

Sold to: Czech Republic (Host), France (Belfond & 10/18), Georgia (Intelekti), Hungary (Európa), Italy (Marsilio) , Netherlands (Meridiaan), Poland (Otwarte), Spanish world rights (Alfaguara)

»Every sentence here attests to the joy of storytelling. From the first page, the reader is right in the middle of this novel of guilt and atonement, feverishly following the general’s plan for revenge. Narrative threads full of questions run below the novel’s thriller-like surface: What effect does the ›toxic past‹ have on the present? Are wars never over? ... everything is told with powerful imagery and sensuousness: Great cinema!« Shortlist German Book Prize 2018 – Jury evaluation

Alexander Orlov, a Russian oligarch known to everyone as »The General«, has started a new life in Berlin. But he cannot escape the memories of his service in the First Chechen War. The darkest of these memories is that of the most gruesome of all nights, after which nothing remained of the young Chechen woman Nura but a great unavenged debt. The time for reckoning has come.
 
After her internationally celebrated epic novel The Eighth Life (for Brilka), Nino Haratischwili has once again turned towards the abyss that lies beneath the rubble left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Union. The Cat and the General is a suspenseful, psychologically profound novel of guilt and atonement about war in countries and in minds, about the longing for peace and redemption. Like a Rubik's cube, the fates of the characters twist and turn around a hidden axis of love and guilt. They are all part of a deadly game in which they collide with the force of a classical tragedy.
 

Born in Tbilisi in 1983, Nino Haratischwili is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theatre director. She writes in German and is among the most acclaimed and widely-read authors of contemporary German literature. Her third novel, The Eighth Life (for Brilka) (FVA 2014), was translated into thirty languages and became an international bestseller. It won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Anna Seghers Prize, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. The Lack of Light (FVA 2022) is her most recent novel. Haratischwili lives in Berlin.

Rights sold to: The Netherlands (Lebowski)

As he sets out to bring to life the eros of childhood and youth within an autobiographical novel, Bodo Kirchhoff takes us into narrow-minded, penny-pinching post-war Germany. It is these decades of dusk, these decades of turmoil, that will ultimately turn the boy into a writer.

Whose voice is it we hear when someone tells a tale from way back when? From the very same room in a small hotel by the sea, his parents had occupied decades earlier, when they’d still helped themselves to large servings of bliss, the last few of those, in fact, before they’d separated, the writer seeks to explore the emergence of his sexuality. And while he does employ professional distance in the telling of the story of his youth, putting it out there for anyone to claim, this story also remains the very path that took him into writing in the first place.  

In »Dusk and Turmoil«, Bodo Kirchhoff, approaches early biographical themes within the framework of a novel, telling his own but also his parent’s stories. The beautiful young actress from Vienna and the dashing one-legged young man from Hannover who is talented but penniless – a match made by the war. Both are determined to escape the plight of these times, each in their own way. The marriage is doomed and the narrator sent off to boarding school at eleven, a dramatic escalation of small events, once again beyond all that is conceivable through language, a dance on an alluring blade of violence.

With this most recent work, Bodo Kirchhoff continues his grand literary project to consolidate language and sexuality to a point where neither will expose the other as he tells a story of eros throughout childhood and adolescence, a story of what was and what it inspired.

Bodo Kirchhoff, born in 1948, is one of the most important and well-known authors of the contemporary German literature. His novels »Desire and Melancholy« (2014) and »Love in Broad Strokes« (2012) were published with Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt and celebrated by readers and critics alike. His novella »Widerfahrnis« has been awarded the German Book Prize 2016 and the Dutch edition (Lebowski 2017) has been longlisted for the Europese Literatuurprijs 2018. The Chinese translation of »Widerfahrnis« was announced as the 21st Century Best Foreign Novel of the Year 2017.

»Bodo Kirchhoff is an author who succeeds in everything: Writing great dialogues. Creating scenes, developing them and, with a dreamlike sureness, interrupting them at the right time. He also has a language of rare and traditional elegance. Entirely great literature.« ZEIT online

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.

»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.

»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.

»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.
 

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.

Sold to: Turkey (Can), Egypt (Masr El Arabia)

Since his wife passed away nine years ago after a leap from 43 meters height, Hinrich lives alone. He wallows in memories of Irene, the mother of his daughter and a translator for high Italian literature. He remembers the summers in Italy, their journeys to Rome and Pompeji, where they lingered in front of the frescoes of the Villa dei Misteri for hours to understand their meaning. They loved cinema, the melancholy of the black-and-white images, but were also seduced by something light. However, what has really happened nine years ago? And what does the letter with the black edging contain? Only a journey to Warsaw can bring light into the dark.

»Desire and Melancholy« is charged with emotionally subtle suspense, a novel which takes the reader on a quest. Slowly but relentless, the protagonist discovers the truth about his wife’s death. Bodo Kirchhoff’s masterful novel is about aging and longing, describing the desire to stay eternally young and a melancholy that turns out to offer some solace at the end.

Bodo Kirchhoff, born in 1948, is one of the most important and well-known authors of the contemporary German literature. His last two novels »Desire and Melancholy« (2014) and »Love in Broad Strokes« (2012) were published with Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt and celebrated by readers and critics alike. His novella »Widerfahrnis« has been awarded the German Book Prize 2016.

»Atmospherically dense like Marguerite Duras.« DIE ZEIT, reviewing ›Iva Breaths‹

»Her art is political. The fact is: she has something to say, and say it she does it. Amanda Lasker-Berlin is a name to remember.« MDR, reviewing ›Elijah’s Song‹

The skin of ten-year-old Spes is as sensitive as a butterfly’s wing. When will she throw off her gauze cocoon and finally be able to fly?

Mirjam travels to a country in upheaval. How do you tell a story when everything is in ruins?

Paul is on the run from his photo, plastered on front pages. It's only an accusation, but what is the truth?

Achura fears a catastrophe, the end of her political career. But would she take back what she said?

Spes, Mirjam, Paul and Achura are each at a turning point. How do you reinvent yourself without losing yourself? Can enough strength be found for a utopia, for a new beginning? Amanda Lasker-Berlin tells the story of four characters, trying to break free from classifications and overcome a crisis. Rapidly intercut perspectives, colliding points of view and voices form together an energy that gathers its power with each page. »Spes Means Hope« is a novel that is bursting with our present moment, and one that widens our view of what is important.

Amanda Lasker-Berlin, born in Essen in 1994, studied fine arts at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and studied stage direction at the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, where she lead a production of Herta Müller’s »Atemschaukel« Her drama ICH, WUNDERWERK AND HOW MUCH I LOVE DISTURBING CONTENT premiered in 2021 as part of the Autor:innentheatertage at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and was awarded the Hermann Sudermann Prize. Her first novel »Elijas Lied« (FVA, 2020) was awarded the debut prize at lit.COLOGNE, followed by the novel »Iva Breathes« at FVA in 2021. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

»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.