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.

»Stauffer’s texts do not shy away from the ›sharp pains‹ that a comprehensive look at the splendor and misery of human existence brings. In addition to their formal range, the unpredictability of these texts is fascinating. Time after time, it hits its mark: straight into the heart.« From the jury's statement of the Manuscript Advancement Award.

»I live in this text, floating from line to line, playing the dead woman. Only here in this sea can I swim, but now it freezes over on all sides.«
Only in appearance do the records oscillate between reality and dreams in their outer chronology, which begins in November 2020 in Vienna. In fact, the text immediately emancipates itself, plunging deeper into a elaborate clockwork whose hands stand still: We accompany the narrator on walks through the deserted Prater neighborhood, and stroll through the nocturnal, closed city, while her precise observations alternate small sharp sequences with lyrical passages. In what paradise can we observe ourselves living today, and what will come in the summer? Witty and cheeky, both sad and comforting, Verena Stauffer reveals an »I« as a center in a time when the longing for touch grows as people are banished to their rooms. She forms a protocol of the »madness that now reveals all the flaws in the entire construction of society,« and offers a testimony to the ways poetry and imagination can offer a lifeline. Verena Stauffer takes on a poetic and humorously biting form as she describes everyday life in times of pandemic.

Verena Stauffer was born in 1978 in Kirchdorf an der Krems in Austria. Her her debut novel Orchis (2018) was nominated for the Alpha Literary Prize, the Independents’ Hotlist, and the Blogger Debut Prize. Most recently her poetry collection Ousia was published by Kookbooks and nominated for the Austrian Book Prize. She is living in Vienna.

Following the success of her novel Mischpoke!, Marcia Zuckerman returns with the next entry in her turbulent German-Jewish family story full of the twists and turns of fate, told through vivid and lively narration—a great reading pleasure.

This turbulent family story full of twists and turns begins on the high seas between New York and London: Johannes »John« Segall, scion of a Jewish family who fled to England on the last Kindertransport in 1939, unexpectedly receives a photograph that sheds light on the last violent minutes of his father’s life. In order to fulfill his own personal mitzvah, John follows the trace of trails scattered over several countries: There is Benno Kohanim-Rubin, who fought in the British Army against the Nazis, his brother Walter who raised the red communist flag over the highest factory chimney in Berlin on  May 1, 1933, and Caesar and Selma Bukofzker, who set sail for Palestine, but, through the infamous odyssey of the ship Atlantic, land in Mauritius. Following the traces of his far-flung family and the wild ramifications of their lives, he comes across outrageous stories of great tragedy and overwhelming injustice; of luck in misfortune, unexpected rescue – and more than one shemozzle.

Marcia Zuckermann tells the story of a German-Jewish family, closely interwoven with historical events that reveal their fortitude in the face of a broad spectrum of persecution. With chutzpah and lively storytelling, she creates an animated panorama of characters from Mischpoke!, whose emigrant fates now take center stage in Shemozzle!.

»I had set upon a vague plan to finally create a proper family chronicle, one with family trees diagraming a confusing, crazy clan that now no longer exist. The only thing we have is our history and our stories, as a last snapshot before the final demise and disintegration of the family. Fortunately, I had no idea at the time what an adventure I was about to embark upon.« From Shemozzle!

Marcia Zuckermann was born in Berlin in 1947. Her Jewish father survived the Holocaust as a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, while her Protestant mother was active in the resistance as a communist. In 1958, the family fled the GDR for West Berlin where Zuckermann trained in advertising in the publishing industry. Today she is a freelance journalist and author living in Berlin. Her successful novel Mischpoke! (2016) was published by FVA.

»Borders, transculturalism, finding identity in the interplay between two cultures: the accuracy and power and defiant audacity of the portrayal in this text completely won us over.« Jury of the Bremen Literature Office in the artist’s house Worpswede

»Don’t touch the interesting ones, marry someone who knows how to cook.« Like all women in the Atanassov family, Grandma Denka is as happy to share her life’s wisdom as her granddaughter, our narrator, is to throw it to the wind. She left Bulgaria shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, and now lives with her husband and daughter in an apartment building in Bremen where hair curlers and soap suds rule. She feels alienated and misunderstood, even in her own marriage. When her father dies, she travels back to her hometown on the Black Sea. There, in her grandmother, mother, and mother-in-law, she encounters strong, dominant women who have always held the strings, and for the first time she investigates the blind spots that reach far back into the country’s communist past. She comes to an understanding of how deeply she is woven into this colorful family web and recognizes which connections provide support and which threads need to be undone.
Antonia Bontscheva describes a generation of self-confident women, the history of individual fates in communist Bulgaria through the transition period, and the realities of migration and self-assertion. With passionate, sensual language, warm and humor, the author’s human-centered gaze make this captivating novel shine.

»The sun poured its gold onto the water. A still-summery, lush, lavish gold upon a green and inviting water. Yet a thin, gauzy ache lay over it all. The beauty of Balchik is not a serene one. The beauty of Balchik is wise and somehow dramatic. It’s beauty breaks your heart.«

Antonia Boncheva was born in Varna, Bulgaria and lives today with her family in Bremen. She studied German language and literature in Berlin, worked as a German teacher and as a journalist, including on a literary radio column for »Funkhaus Europa.« The Beauty of Balchik is not Serene is her debut novel, for which she received the Bremen Author’s Scholarship from the Senator for Culture and a grant from the Bremen Literature Office in the artist’s house Worpswede.

»A great, magnificent, glorious book with a surprise ending that grips hard.« Feridun Zaimoglu

»With her third novel Moon over Concrete, Julia Rothenburg, born in 1990, has become an indispensable figure in contemporary German literature.« Salzburger Nachrichten

Twelve floors of steel wrap their arms around Kottbusser Tor, where the city’s heart of concrete has been beating unsteadily since the early seventies. The press regularly writes of ›Kotti‹ as a dangerous urban hotspot, a drug hub. Mutlu, Barış, Aylin, Stanca, Marianne und Günther live here, in the Neues Zentrum Kreuzberg building. Their stories, a chronicle of personal misfortunes, are closely interwoven with the life of the neighborhood. When Stanca makes a terrible discovery one night and Mutlu’s sons threaten to slip into the neighborhood's milieu of drugs, an impromptu vigilante group is formed. Meanwhile, what goes unnoticed is a completely different, all-encompassing danger writing its own ending in secret.

Julia Rothenburg offers empathetic portraits of characters struggling for a self-determined existence of their own choosing. A urban polyphony emerges, illustrating the emergence of cracks that can break apart individual lives and an entire community.

Julia Rothenburg was born in 1990 in Berlin and studied sociology and political science in Freiburg and Berlin. Her debut Koslik is Ill (FVA, 2017) was awarded the Retzhof Prize for Young Literature and the Scholarship for Literature from the German State of Baden-Württemberg. The accompanying radio play was nominated for the ARD Radio Play Prize 2020. Following bright/dark (FVA, 2019), her third novel Moon Over Concrete was published in 2021 and won the the 2021 Wortspiele Prize from Bavarian Radio 2.

Rights sold to: Turkey (Ilksatır Publishing)

»An absorbing family saga that readers will be unable to put down. Couscous with Cinnamon explores the fascinating lives of its strong female characters, as well as the emotional connections that bond the family together. Couscous with Cinnamon combines sharp insights into different European cultures and histories with distinctive and appealing characters whose stories are intertwined in a moving and mesmerising read.« New Books In German, US Jury Pick
 
Three Women. Three Political Upheavals. Three Fates – a stirring family novel full of emotional warmth, empathy and a zest for storytelling
 
In her final years, centenarian Lucile spends her time reading in her Paris apartment. After her death, her daughter Marie also passes away, leaving behind the apartment and the memories of two independent, scarred women. Marie's daughter Lisa, living in Berlin, plans to sell the apartment and leave the past behind. The relationship between Marie and Lucile was tumultuous—Lucile, a strong yet self-absorbed woman from Tunisia, had returned to France with her daughters after independence. Lisa knew the struggles between them, especially her mother's pain over losing her homeland. Marie’s painful return to France, her first dramatic love in Paris in May 1968, her flight from Lucille's attacks to Berlin – she told Lisa everything. But, can Lisa really believe her mother's stories? While the protests of the ›Nuit Debout‹ Movement rage in the streets in 2016, Lisa vacates her Paris apartment and tries to trace the relationship between her mother and grandmother. But the deeper she goes, the greater her doubts that there is any truth to her family.
 
Elsa Koester portrays three women of strong character whose fates are marked by social upheaval and crisis. The incredible lightness with which she interweaves the perspectives of three generations, the individuality of the characters and the author's socially perceptive view make this novel an unforgettable reading experience.
 

Elsa Koester was born in 1984 in Berlin, the daughter of a French Pied-Noir with Tunisian colonial history and a North German Frisian with US-American emigration history. She studied literature, political science, and sociology. She lives in Berlin as a political journalist. newly reignited debate about identity and homeland inspired her novel debut Couscous with Cinnamon, which draws on her experience as a journalist and activist with a diverse cultural background.

December 1946: Bärel is the first Jewish child born in the Catholic hospital since the end of the war. His parents, Klara and Leon Bromberger, decide not to look back anymore and to only care for the future. But a fateful encounter throws Klara back into the past. She starts to write her memories down ...  

»This one makes the impression he has seen the world before«, comments the doctor on the newborn, the hospital’s first Jewish child since the end of the war. The nuns, who were still in need of someone to be the Saviour in the nativity play, sneak him into the crip: »Jesus was also born as a Jew«. 

Ice flowers were the only flowers Klara and Leon Bromberger had at their wedding in January 1946. It was a celebration without family since Klara and Leon are the only survivors. A golden watch is the last remaining souvenir. Less than a year later, expecting the birth of their son Bärel, they both want to move on and to look forward. But during a walk in a park, Klara is suddenly struck: The short and obviously pregnant woman is Liliput, her former camp commander! Klara can no longer speak or eat. She even stops looking after Bärel. Her husband is desperate. He sees only one way out for Klara: »Start writing, Klara, get it out there. Avert the evil on paper! Chain it with your words!«

Klara dares to look back into the abyss and writes herself back to life. She describes: Her father's elegant shoe shop, the ghetto Zamość and the hasty farewell, the escape, the strangely flashing eyes of old Piasecki, her work in the casino in Lublin – the cave of the lion. Klara writes about the camp, the hunger, the freezing cold, about Martha's bell-bright, unforgettable Hail Mary – and about the delicate, ice-cold commander with the child's voice, they called Liliput.

Minka Pradelski was born in 1947 in the DP camp Zeilsheim (Germany) as a child of Holocaust survivors. After her internationally successful novel »Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman« (FVA 2005) her new book is about a chapter of German history whose contemporary witnesses are dwindling. Pradelski impressively combines the voices of her three protagonists into a moving narrative: Klara's deeply tragic and touching story, Bromberger's rough, loving temperament and baby Bärels' cheeky viewpoint complement each other. Pradelski addresses the in-between her characters find themselves in during the post-war period, as close to death as they are to life. Surrounded by their memories which might light up any second, they struggle for a future.

Minka Pradelski is a German sociologist and documentary filmmaker. She worked as an assistant with Clemens de Boor at the Sigmund Freud Institute on the project »The aftermath of massive traumatization among Jewish survivors of the Nazi era« and as an honorary member of the USC Shoah Foundation. Pradelski lives in Frankfurt am Main.

Rights: Liepman AG, contact

In Elija's Song, Amanda Lasker-Berlin presents us with a brilliant portrait of three very different sisters, boldly addressing highly topical issues in irresistible, gripping prose.

Elija is the oldest of the sisters. Born with Down syndrome, she takes in the beauty of the world through her heavy-lidded eyes. She adores the stage. When she plays the role of Hagar who is sent to the desert, alone and with child, Elija is a mother. In real life, she will never be.
Noa works in a canteen. Every lunchtime, she hopes to spot Akim, her lover who works on the top floor of the glass tower overviewing the river Elbe. They talk about many things, her exmatriculation, her travels to East Asia, but not about where she goes every day when her shift in the canteen is over.
Loth, the youngest, is striking in her statue-like beauty. And she is angry. At demonstrations they call her a Nazi. She in turn suspects the left of being twisted fascists. She has moved to Halle, into a flat share with her like-minded friends, and she is ready to fight.
Elija, Noa and Loth used to be close before Loth changed sides. Maybe a trip to the moor, retracing their childhood footsteps can help bridge the abyss between them.
The hike is Loth's idea: so they can be sisters once again – cross the moor and climb the mountain and sing the song their father wrote for them. But the moor has changed as much as the sisters have. Elija, Noa and Loth spend the day alone together, each of them absorbed by her own thoughts and memories. Memories even the moorland can’t swallow. And nothing to hold on to.

Amanda Lasker-Berlin masters the art of reduction, of leaving traces, of generating ever increasing vibrations up to a final eruption that will leave readers breathless. Her smooth, condensed language, her empathy and confidence in the power of her characters as well as her skilled portrayal of social controversies show Lasker-Berlin as an outstandingly talented debut author.

Amanda Lasker-Berlin, born in 1994 in Essen, staged her first play at the age of 18. Following her studies of the liberal arts at the Bauhaus University in Weimar she is currently studying directing in Ludwigsburg. For her drama Yellow Desert / Pink Room she was awarded the „ThOP-Nachwuchsdramatikerpreis“, her play Amazonen verrecken won the 3rd “Osnabrücker Dramatikerpreis“ in 2019. For her prose she was awarded the jury prize of the Münchner Kurzgeschichten Wettbewerb and she was a finalist of the Hattinger Förderpreis für junge Literatur. Elija's Song is her first novel and nominated for the LitCologne Debut Prize 2020.

The heroine of the novel is a modern woman who wants it all: family as well as a career as a successful opera singer. But all of a sudden, her ex-husband crosses her boundaries. She cracks up, celebrates, drinks, takes drugs, forgets the children in a hotel. A breathless search begins.

As she wakes up, she finds herself on the bed of a hotel room. The curtains float into the room like clouds in the sky. What the hell is she doing here? As if someone had pressed a reset button, all her memories are gone. Only slowly drizzling back into her consciousness. But then reality hits her like a stroke: She is a mum of two small children! She remembers having been at the opera, but what happened after that? One thing is for sure: she needs to find them, quickly.
A breathless search begins: She is running. She is chasing down streets. She has to get a grip on her life again and finally get the leading role in the opera.
The reader follows the heroine on her odyssey, driven by her concern for her children, in which everything is at stake: the well-being of her kids; her concept of her self, the idea that she has to combine being a career woman and mother; her feeling of having to defend herself against the self-sacrifice that everyday life as a single parent demands of her. A homeless person jumps in as a nanny, the ex-husband is replaced by a dog. She has had enough of pleasing everyone, which is why »About to burst« is the fast-paced liberation story of a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is a novel about the maternal instinct, lust, fear of failure, breakdown and self-assertion.

Julia Malik was born in Berlin. After finishing her acting studies at the »Hochschule für Musik und Theater« in Hamburg, she worked at various theatres, including the »Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg« and the »Thalia Theater Hamburg«, the »Schauspielhaus Hannover« and the »Theatre National du Luxembourg«. Julia Malik is working as an actress in film and TV productions and plays the violin in the Berlin band »Hands up-excitement«. She lives in Berlin.

Sold to: The Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam)

Film rights sold to: epo-film

»Don’t you remember that words can be sharp like knives?«

Maximilian Wenger used to be a big shot. He was a best-selling author and a man of action. Now, he’s standing at the edge of ruin: nobody wants to read his novels, and his wife has traded him in for a fitness instructor. In a small apartment near Salzburg, he hides himself away from the world. Wenger’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Zoe, plans a future according to her own beliefs. She soon realizes, however, that she has reached her own limits – and that becoming an adult is painful. Then, Wegner starts to receive those letters. Though they are addressed to the previous tenant, he opens them and is thrilled: they are brutal and delicate, shocking and inspiring. Who is this mysterious woman that tells of fleeting happiness, injury, and dashed hope? What Wenger doesn’t know, is that Zoey is also reading the letters. She has experienced something that she finds reflected in those furious words. Both father and daughter are being lead toward a crossroads at which something old ends and something new begins.

With intelligence, adroit humor, and great empathy, Mareike Fallwickl writes about the ups and downs of love, friendship, and family; illusory worlds, both digital and analog; abuse of power, and female self-empowerment, unleashing a maelstrom that thrills until the very end.

A mesmerizing book about how relationships succeed and fail, about power and how it is abused, and about men and women and all that passes between them.

»This is a book as relevant as can be. This is a book that will and must be spoken about.
Mareike Fallwickl dissects humanity, love, and life itself with her razor-sharp words, fascinating deeply in the process.« Florian Valerius, bookseller and bookstagrammer @literarischernerd

Mareike Fallwickl was born in Hallein bei Salzburg in 1983. She currently lives in the Salzburg region where she works as a freelance writer, pens a weekly column for a Salzburg newspaper, and, since 2009, runs her own literature blog. Her debut novel »Dark Green Almost Black«, published by FVA in 2018, was celebrated by readers and nominated for both the Austrian Book Prize and the »Favorite Book of Independent Booksellers« Award. 

»An adolescent journey during the year 1989: Susanne Gregor’s supremely readable novel gives readers an exceptional insight into an important chapter of recent European history« New Books in German

Miša, Rita and Slavka have been friends for as long as they can remember. They all live in the same house in the city of Žilina: Miša, the 14-year-old narrator, and her family in the middle, Rita, also 14, in the apartment above, and Slavka in the apartment underneath. They confide their secrets in one another and speak about their first loves. And yet, they could scarcely be more different. Rita is a staunch Youth Pioneer, which makes her parents’ confidential plan to escape to Austria seem all the more scandalous. Rita is outraged: she doesn’t want to end up like Slavka whose father absconded to Sweden 10 years ago. Slavka cares little for politics. Rather, she is interested in the new history teacher, Comrade Baník, and in gymnastics, her real passion. Miša is the most sensitive of the three. Her love is literature, which nobody – least of all her father – can really understand. Miša has the feeling that life will always continue on in the same manner. The opposite is the case: It is 1989 and nothing will ever be as it was.

Three friends and their families experience the year before the collapse of the Socialist regime in Slovakia. Opportunism or rebellion; adaption or revolt – the girls on the brink of adulthood and their parents, each face socialism’s decline in their own way.

In precise, elegant language Susanne Gregor insightfully explores the external and internal worlds of the three young friends. By means of small shifts, she allows huge transformations to become tangible and with a steady hand, leads the reader through the seasons of the year 1989. It is »The Last Red Year.«

Susanne Gregor, born in 1981 in Žilina (Czechoslovakia), moved with her family to Austria in 1990. Since 2005, Gregor lives in Vienna where she teaches German as a foreign language. In 2009, she received the ›Hohenemser Literaturpreis‹ Advancement Award and the ›exil-literaturpreis‹ in 2010. Her debut novel »No Place of One’s Own« was published in 2011, the novel »Territories« in 2015 and the short story collection »Under Water« in 2018.

Awarded the Swiss Literature Prize 2020!

»Time is a great healer. But I knew: That’s a lie. Time doesn’t heal anything. Going by. That’s all she’s capable of. And she’s not even very good at that.«

Except for the high bridge, there is nothing special about the little town Alba lives in. The bridge is 25 meters high, on a windless day the fall lasts 2,08 seconds and statistically the street underneath is the most dangerous in all of Switzerland: The school-year is far from over and her class is already down by three students. Meanwhile in Zurich, students are protesting, they are fighting for cultural freedom, against housing shortage and drugs on the streets. »Deflate the state!«, that’s their war-cry. The world seems to be upside down and Alba is caught right in the midst of it all while dealing with her very own problems. One of them: Jack. Shortly after Alba’s ›accident‹, the two of them become a couple. For the moment, Alba is happy, but no one knows better than Alba that there must be a snag – especially when it comes to happiness.
Demian Lienhard’s story of the highs and lows in his protagonist’s life is strikingly original, full of intelligent humor and subtle tragedy. The reader follows his refreshingly rebellious and likeable narrator through the blistering 1980’s and 1990’s which were informed by growing social problems and an insurgent youth movement. The narrative voice itself is the glowing core of this novel, a sparkling mix of »Smells Like Teen Spirit«, »La Boum« and an irresistible warmth, black humor and wittiness – you’ll be ready to follow her wherever she goes, even if it’s a trip to hell.

Demian Lienhard was born in 1987 in Baden/Switzerland. He has completed his Ph.D in classical archaeology and works as a research fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt on the Main. He has received numerous stipends and has won awards and competitions with his unpublished works. In 2016, he participated in the »24. open mike« in Berlin and in 2018, he ranked second in the »Prenzlauer Berg writing contest«. »I am the girl my mother warned me about« is his début novel.