Rightslist

German Book Prize 2016, 21st Century Best Foreign Novel of the Year 2017 award (China)

Rights sold to:

France (Gallimard), Italy (Neri Pozza Editore), The  Netherlands (Lebowski), Denmark (Bechs Forlag), Czech Republic, (Akropolis), China ( People’s Literature Publishing House), Korea (Redsamnamu), Turkey (Can Yayınları), Greece (Aiora Press), Egypt (General Authority für kulturelle Paläste, Ministerium für Kultur)

Until recently, Reither ran a small publishing company in the big city, now he lives a solitary life on the edge of the Alps. In the evening, his pondering over a mysterious book is interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. He opens the door and right there and then, the encounter which will take him to Sicily within three days, begins. The hand that takes him there is Leonie Palm's. Leonie used to own a hat-shop. But now that the world lacks faces that look good with hats on and writers have come to outnumber readers, they both had good reasons to quit. Yet, an even stronger bond between the two is provided by the fact that neither of them is prepared for true love anymore. Upon arrival on the Mediterranean, after three full days in the car, this love does hit them and they are joined by a girl who does not speak a single word. She is just there ...

In his novella »Widerfahrnis«, Bodo Kirchhoff presents the parable of a twofold fall: into love, without being able to fully feel it and into humanity, without being good enough.

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 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.

Where action meets reflection: »World of Glass« by Ernst-Wilhelm-Händler

Jillian and Jacob Armacost run New York’s most famous glass gallery. A truly disparate couple.  While Jillian has had a passion for the glasses of Tiffany’s ever since a childhood experience which at the age of twenty five made her a leading expert, thirty years older womanizer Jacob almost ruins their business with a really bad bargain.
Jillian wants to divorce Jacob, but first she has to secure the future of the gallery. A valuable collection of glass vases in Italy seem to be the last resort – without the slightest hesitation she flys to Europe. Meanwhile Jacob is at the mexican border. By entertaining an eccentric client he tries to come into money his own way.
Jillian and Jacob Armacost both committed their fate to the glass: She hopes for eternity, he lives life for the moment. Transparent but inaccessible, living yet still steady – the World of Glass. It means a lot of money for those who recognize what they see. While Jillian hits the bull’s eye in Italy, Jacob is kidnapped in Mexico …

Car chases in the streets of Tijuana, escapades in San Diego and in Venice – in Ernst-Wilhelm Händler’s great  novel action meets reflection in a both surprising and imposing way.

Ernst-Wilhelm Händler was born in 1953, and lives in Regensburg and Munich.

»Composed with the suspense of a crime novel, the objective of philosophical concerns, with historical precision and psychological flair.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Konrad Weber is the deputy head of the German Consulate in Milan, which, seeming a peaceful place in 1943, protects him from the daily routine of the Nazi dictatorship. After his superior retires he has a much younger and inexperienced henchman plonked in front of him. Palmer finds out about some discrepancies in the books of account Weber is responsible for. Wendler, an acquaintance of his, provides a way out of Webers more than difficult situation, certainly not in an act of charity.  He proposes a risky deal ...

Nora Bossong's debut novel »Hereabout« (FVA, 2006) was praised »one of the best in the last years«. In her second book »Weber's Record« a young narrator reconstructs Weber's past with the help of an old diplomat: an exciting novel, artistically synchronizing various time levels – a book about a german diplomat under Hitler, and in Post-War Germany, where everybody's trying to forget about the past.

»A highly concentrated character sketch of a contemporary witness and a suspenseful crime novel!« Frankfurter Rundschau

»The most talented writer of her generation! Comparably young authors pale into insignificance beside the historical precision and the stylistic intuition of Nora Bossong.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Nora Bossong lives in Berlin. Her research took the young writer to Rome, Milan and Zurich where she came into contact with the highly official but secretive world of diplomats and state secretaries. She got a scholarship for the German House in New York for »Weber's Record«

There is a promise having been made years ago: The one, who will gain a foothold in the big city, will make the other follow. Now she has come after her boy friend overseas, first and foremost to give herself a try in the distant metropolis. What was meant to be a fresh start turns out as the beginning of a farewell. There are Gregor’s extra hours and their uneasiness in the evenings when they both lie side by side in the dark. And the cat in the patio, which he feeds when he feels unobserved. Chased by her longing for familiar terrain, the narrator roams the wintrily streets and searches for some signs of love and their former intimacy.
She remembers scenes from the beginning of their relationship: when their bodies’ interplay seemed to overcome every limit and they both clung to the same dreams, when she presented him the documents for the Green-Card-Lottery believing she could push their common future. Now she has to painfully accept that he refuses her warmth and secludes himself. Visiting an opera performance together turns out as a disaster. The atmosphere is fragile as glass and compares to someone holding his breath. It keeps on until both are visiting a party. Suddenly a scene flashes through her mind when? in front of an open fridge? everything between them had unnoticedly fallen into pieces.

With a trenchant and distinct voice Britta Boerdner creates an emotional world distinguished by high-minded authenticity, a melancholic microcosm within a metropolis whose rigidity already points towards departure. By using impressive images the novel describes the moment when a love relationship silently – in hiding – ends.

Britta Boerdner was born in Fulda. After training as a bookseller, she majored in American studies, German studies and historical ethnology in Frankfurt on the Main. Her debut novel »What Remains Hidden«, published in 2012, has been followed by her second novel »The Day That Frank Z. Came to the ›Green Tree Inn‹«, published by FVA in 2017. Britta Boerdner lives in Frankfurt on the Main.

Awarded the Ulla Hahn Prize For Literary Debut 2018

»Let’s say we go?«
»It’s too cold, also it’ll start snowing soon,« I say.    
I watch Karine bite her lip until it’s bloody.
 »But don’t you want to know?«, she asks.  
»What?«
»Well what’s behind the hills?!«

Ever since their mother left, one afternoon in January, the sixteen-year-old Pauli and her adopted sister Karine have had to fend for themselves. Being the elder of the two, Pauli has tried to uphold a daily routine. But the supply of preserves their mother made before she disappeared is dwindling and though it’s only November, the horizon already appears rather menacing. After the last of their fellow villagers have left and as the landscape glows with sinister pale green moonlight, that Pauli begins to feel irresistibly drawn to the hills on the horizon. It’s the unknown behind those hills that seems to swallow everyone, first their father and later even Powel the tall boy with the peculiar face, the only person Pauli has confided in. In search of an explanation, Pauli’s thoughts wander back into the past. Dark stories come to light, her fear of loneliness, the life of an outsider, a vague threat that seems to be coming from within as much as from without. Finally, Pauli realizes that she’ll have to take action, and quickly, before the snow begins to fall.

»Waiting for the snow« is a straightforward début novel. Karoline Menge’s precise language creates a dense atmosphere, calm and captivating, nothing short of hypnotic. Skillfully, she employs archaic fairytale motives and weaves them into a modern story that lures the reader deeper and deeper into its uncanny fictional world. With a courageous heroine at its center who overcomes her darkest fears, »Waiting for the snow« tells the tale of a family whose members bring disaster upon each other.  

Karoline Menge was born in 1986 in Berlin, then studied literary writing in Hildesheim. Her short stories have been published in a number of anthologies, she was voted second in the Würth prize for literature and in 2015 she received a grant from the state of Lower Saxony. In addition to her work as a novelist, Karoline Menge also writes screenplays. She currently lives in Berlin. »Waiting For The Sknow« was awarded the Ulla Hahn Prize 2018.

3sat Prize 2016, Nicolas Born Prize for Best Young Author 2017, Longlist German Book Prize 2017, Robert Gernhardt Prize 2018

Rights sold to: France (Le Castor Astral)

Every day, the retired entrepreneur Walter Nowak swims his laps in the outdoor pool. An encounter on a particularly hot morning throws him off kilter and the consequences are fatal: Walter finds himself stretched out on his bathroom floor, unable to move, his head throbbing. He thinks of Yvonne, but she has taken off for a conference. Walter is on his own. »From now on it's downwards, ever downwards« he thinks. And it seems to be true. He continues to lose control over the situation. He finds himself buried underneath thought fragments and images from the past: there is that Christmas Eve with Gisela, her pork roast, her tears; the look on the face of his son Felix when he learns about the separation; memories from his own childhood as the son of an American GI born out of wedlock and finally, the diagnosis his urologist has just revealed to him. While all the images get more and more blurry, his thoughts begin to move in circles that grow smaller and smaller – nearing a hidden core, the beginning or the end … When the summer storm finally begins to thunder, his son Felix suddenly appears in front of his door.

Julia Wolf turns her protagonist inside out with great narrative authority: Walter Nowak, an aging man, a child of the post-war era, finds himself at a crossroads. His stream of consciousness takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the human psyche and showcases Julia Wolf's virtuous command of language.

Julia Wolf, born in 1980 in Groß-Gerau, Germany, now lives in Berlin and Leipzig. For her debut novel »Alles ist jetzt« (»Everything Is Now«) she was awarded the Kunstpreis Literatur, a prize funded by the Brandenburg Lotto GmbH, and she also received numerous grants. At Ingeborg Bachmann Competition 2016, she read an excerpt from her novel »Walter Nowak won’t get up« and received the prestigious 3sat Prize in the process. In 2017 she was awarded the Nicolas-Born-Prize for the best debut and longlisted for the German Book Prize 2017. For her novel project »Old Girls« she was awarded the notable Robert Gernhardt Prize 2018.

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.

Sold to: USA (Metropolitan/New York), Italy (Neri Pozza), Netherlands (Signature)

Two women of different ages with two different pasts:  an elderly survivor of the Holocaust and a young Jewish woman who for the fi rst time is confronted by the personal account of her family’s story.

Minka Pradelski, daughter of Holocaust survivors, a sociologist and documentary writer, has written a touching, humorous novel; a charming read about an almost forgotten time and about the drift between generations: the generation which survived the Holocaust and the generation of their children, who know little about that time and even less about the peaceful time »before«.

»And Along Came Mrs. Kugelmann« is the first novel by sociologist and documentary writer Minka Pradelski. She has been working for a project on the consequences of the massive trauma experienced by survivors of the Nazi regime. She has also been working as an honorary member for the Steven Spielberg Shoa Foundation and for several other social commissions of the Jewish community in Frankfurt where she lives. She has published several articles about Jewish life in the ghetto of Theresienstadt and of life in Germany after 1945.

In his early forties, Dave is married, a father of three children and living in Vienna. While his older son Max gets lost in the virtual worlds of computer games, smokes marihuana and neglects school, his daughter becomes ever more alienated from him as she hits puberty. His marriage is also falling apart. Dave feels isolated, he is haunted by nightmares and he worries about his youngest who spends his nights dreaming about a robot friend on an alien planet. Trying to understand his own dream world, Dave seeks the advice of a therapist. In the process, he becomes familiar with the concept of lucid dreaming and begins to experiment with this technique. His reality becomes more and more porous and the dream images become increasingly overwhelming. They take him back into his childhood, which he spent in New York City in the 1970s, and he immerses deeper and deeper into his parent’s stories. His father, with whom he has a difficult relationship, was an American businessman while his mother’s parents had to flee from the Nazis. The story that begins to emerge from these excursions becomes ever more puzzling, so Dave decides to talk to his only remaining relative in New York. It is this relative who reveals a well-kept family secret that ends up shedding a completely new light on his dreams.

Ruth Cerha’s hero of »Dream Rocket« follows the traces that his parent’s lives have left in his own by exploring the fascinating possibilities of dreams – enabling the dreamer to craft a bridge between the conscious and the subconscious. It is this bridge that provides him with the key to a chapter of his family history that was kept in the dark for so long.

Ruth Cerha, born in Vienna in 1963, studied psychology and was a musician and composer with a number of bands before starting to write prose in 2004. Following her novels »Head Out of the Clouds« (2010) and »One-Tenth Brothers« (2012 / 2018 FVA), Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt published »Bora. A Story of the Wind« (2015), for which she was awarded the Austrian State Scholarship for Literature.

As the year 2006 comes to an end, Gustav von Achenbach, a German cultural sociologist and expert on post-colonial architecture, travels to Havana and finds that the city – and the political dreams connected with it – has undergone much change. »Maybe it was the moral decay that fascinated him more than the physical deterioration. It was the erosion of a system which, in a far-away past, had represented and incarnated adolescent hope from all around the globe.« Since that time, in light of the visible corrosion, the protagonist must revise his youthful enthusiasm: the city of Havana, once grand, is now in ruins, the dictator Fidel Castro is dying. Cuban life, however, goes on – Havana is full of heat. Aimlessly, Achenbach walks the dirty streets, pushes himself through the colorful, fun-loving crowds – every street corner offers quick sex. Yet Achenbach is looking for someone in particular: a mysterious young man. His search becomes a desperate one, which leads him down stray paths, until he finally finds the embrace which he has been yearning for his whole life.

The author Hans Christoph Buch lives in Berlin but has visited Cuba regularly for three decades. He has had insight into the country and people of Cuba and even taught at the University of Havana. His novel is an attempt to rewrite Thomas Mann's famous novella »Death in Venice«, inspired by the background of the excruciatingly long agony of the »máximo líder« Fidel Castro and the political system he created. The author can not – and does not want to – elude the morbid charm of this leader and his system.

His book is a declaration of his love of Cuba, but also challenges the unconditional Cuba-enthusiasm of leftist »revolution tourists«, amounting to political and literary provocation.

In 1963, at the age of 19, Hans Christoph Buch became the youngest-ever member of the influential German literary association »Gruppe 47«. He has written numerous political reports and essays, primarily about Caribbean and African conflict zones. His publications with the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt are the novella »Tod in Habana« and the novel »Reise um die Welt in acht Nächten«. Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt also published »Elf Arten, das Eis zu brechen« (2016) and the essay »Boat People. Literatur als Geisterschiff« (2014).

Had anyone told him a few years ago that he would end up in Hannover-Langenhagen, Jesse Bronske would not have believed them. Neither would he have trusted anyone who suggested that Mona, who works at the cash register in the supermarket inside of which Jesse runs a bar called »Klaus Meine«, would become the woman by his side. From the moment he is born, Jesse's aspirations to be extraordinary are doomed to fail: his identical twin Aaron looks so much like him that not even their father can tell the two boys apart. Thus Jesse grows up the exact copy of his older brother in Hamburg-Rahlstedt where their father – the owner of a snack stand and an Elvis impersonator – slowly but surely turns the house into an Elvis museum. Jesse moves to Langenhagen in order to leave all of that behind and begin a new life. But despite his relationship with Mona and the (possibly) imaginary pen pal Klaus Meine, Jesse cannot let go of the fear of being interchangeable. One day, while incessant rain slowly makes its way into the house and threatens to flood everything, Jesse notices a figure in a nearby cornfield. All of the sudden he is certain: Aaron has returned to his life in order to replace him. However, Jesse is prepared...

SUPERBUHEI is a literary-psychological thriller a sub-urban novel, a viscous romantic comedy, a cross between Sven Regener’s Herr Lehmann, Frank Schulz’ Onno Viets and Fight Club. Sven Amtsberg's furious and long-awaited debut novel takes us into previously unknown realms of reading pleasure. His unique sound carries the reader from one page to the next and his tone is just as sharp as his wit.

Sven Amtsberg was born in 1972 and lives in Hamburg. He is a writer and he hosts and presents for a diverse array of entertainment formats. In 2001 and 2008, he received a prize for promising young writers from the city of Hamburg, while in 2011 he was granted a work scholarship by the federal state Schleswig-Holstein. His latest publications include: »The Truth About Germany« (2011), »111 Reasons to Love the FC St. Pauli« (2013) as well as »Paranormal Phenomena – 20 Stories that Are Almost True.« (2015). »SUPERBUHEI«, is his debut as a novelist.

»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.