V & Q Books – förlag

Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us into a war between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed Dante scholar, is trying to change the world and write a novel. She, a passable actress, has given up her safe job at the theatre to care for their child. He is delirious, she is on edge. With the rent overdue and violence looming on all sides, the two of them circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss. Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis ‘When I first met Ivana Sajko and heard and read her writing, I instantly knew it was something special. I felt the force of her language, the pain of love and war, and I was stung by her clear and poetic Sajko sound.’ Clemens Meyer 'Wow, what an incredible novel. The language! Thank you for publishing this book.' Katja Schneider, stories! bookshop, Hamburg ‘A sound that tells of political and economic vacuums felt by people in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia to this day.’ MDR Kultur

Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what’s going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan’s book is a big hitter in Germany – and now it’s coming home to roost. ‘A colossal pleasure for anyone who appreciates subtle irony.’ Brigitte magazine‘This book is a phenomenon. I haven’t yet come across anyone who didn’t like it. Everyone smiles when they talk about it.’ Kerstin Gier

What brings people to today’s Berlin, what makes them stay?For some, the city is a place of refuge, from war and persecution, bigotry or boredom. For others, it’s the history or the nightlife or the broad green spaces that attract them – or haunt them. And a few are just born here. How do they cope with the pressure, with housing shortages, racism, club queues, bicycle thefts, shitty jobs, with home catching up on them?Berlin Babel presents fourteen short stories by writers originating from Syria, Turkey, China, the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Spain, Russia, Germany, Italy and India. From Arabic to Italian to Yiddish, the stories are beautifully translated from eight different languages.The selection captures life in Berlin with all its despairs and joys. This first ever international anthology of contemporary writing on the city unites a wide range of perspectives. For all those who love the city, and for anyone curious to discover it.Featuring stories by:Odai Al Zoubi translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette / Carla Berges translated from Spanish by Isabel Adey / Leon Craig / Ulrike Draesner translated from German by Lyn Marven / Linda Farata translated from Italian by Han Smith / FENG Yurui translated from Chinese by WU Xiujie / Lin Hierse translated from German by Jon Cho-Polizzi / LJ Kessels / Natasha Podlyzhnyak translated from Russian by Will Firth / Nainy Sahani / Jake Schneider translated from Yiddish by himself / Meral Şimşek translated from Turkish by Umut Simsek / David Wagner translated from German by Imogen Taylor / Jane Yager

Lucy Fricke’s Daughters tells the story of two women either side of forty on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way. A bestseller and booksellers’ favourite in Germany, Daughters evokes laughter and tears by way of life and death, friendship and family.

Francis Nenik’s thrilling slice of narrative non-fiction Journey through a Tragicomic Century is about the life of the forgotten writer Hasso Grabner, told with great joy in language and love of absurdity. The journey takes us from the Young Communists in 1920s Leipzig to wartime Corfu, with Grabner falling from steelworks director to a vilified author banned from publishing his work in the GDR. If you're looking for a bizarre life history of a forgotten writer, Hasso Grabner certainly fits the bill.

Sandra Hoffmann’s Paula is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer’s relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce?

Part one of the Anatolian Blues trilogyTold with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother’s early death. Ever close to her loving father, Gül grows into a warm-hearted, hard-working young woman. The Blacksmith’s Daughter is a novel full of carefree summers and hard winters, old wives’ tales and young people’s ambitions – the melancholy beauty and pain of an ordinary life. ‘Fatih Akın says of Selim Özdoğan’s new novel: “If everyone read this book, the world would be a better place – more considerate, more liveable, more tolerant.” Believe him!’ Brigitte magazine

‘Madgermanes’ is what the Mozambican workers once contracted out to East Germany are called today. At the end of the 1970s, some 20,000 of them were sent from the People’s Republic of Mozambique to the GDR to labour for their socialist sister country. After the Berlin Wall fell, almost all of them lost their residency status. Decades later, they are still waiting for most of their wages to be paid.Birgit Weyhe depicts their search for belonging and a place to call home, caught between two cultures and two states that no longer exist. Based on extensive interviews, she creates three fictitious narrators and transforms their stories into a visual language that skilfully interweaves African and European narrative traditions. Winner of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation Comic Book Prize and the Max and Moritz Prize for Best German Comic ‘The book is a great document and a monument to the injustice that befell me and other contract workers in East Germany.’ Emiliano Chaimite, Dresden ‘Birgit Weyhe traces emotions and situations, translating them into overwhelming images by entering into an artistic dialogue between European and African culture.’ Max and Moritz Prize

Each of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it's the crimes of the Nazi era, which have hurt him for as long as he can remember. That's why he became an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management; now, though, he's wondering if he should make a change. For his best friend, Graziela, that past was also her focal point--until she met a man who desired her. From then on, sexual pleasure became the key to her life; a concept she's now beginning to doubt. Hans and Graziela thought the Nazi crimes were the inheritance that neither could bear, but can we really blame Nazism for everything? Iris Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their clutches to this day. Can a country manage its past, or ought we to remain helpless in the face of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust?Iris Hanika has all the humour, love of experimentation and political rage of a German Lucy Ellmann, over fewer pages. ‘A novel that opens up a window. A masterpiece.’ Denis Scheck, ARD druckfrisch‘It’s impossible to live with this guilt. Making that so emphatically clear by means of fiction, after sixty-five years of intense debate, is this novel’s great achievement.’ Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'A brave account of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his nation’s past, which draws an artful distinction between memory and memorial.’ Michael Arditti

‘You’ll live out your lives in a foreign country,’ Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you’re far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return. Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gül will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father, for scents, colours and fruit. Yet Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home.A novel about how home is found in many places from the author of The Blacksmith's Daughter (9783863912949)‘Honest, urgent and emotional.’ Augsburger Allgemeine‘An absolutely recommended novel that quietly stimulates the reader’s thoughts and portrays the hard work behind seeing a new country as home.’ migazin

Eight essays on literature, language, art, Europe and life from one of Germany’s most revered living writers. After a visit to Putin’s old postbox, the reader is taken to Dresden and Brixton, Gdańsk and Minsk, diverted to birds, bees, stray cats and pet dogs, confronted with Stasi and KGB, Proust and Jah Shaka, puzzled by overcoats and anoraks, Francis Bacon and Vermeer, and lost (then found) in service stations and memorial centres. Throughout, Marcel Beyer forges unexpected links and makes unpredictable leaps. “I work from the margins, partly very literally as I build my sentences, for instance when I start with the name of a colour rather than a noun, to explore how the sentence might be steered from there to a subject. In my reading, I am drawn to the outliers or, as malicious claims would have it, to the obscure. Central books: that is, those everyone can agree on, have never much interested me. I am rarely tempted to explore the centre of my world in writing, and even if I did want to encroach upon a centre, I would have to choose a path from the outside. But outside, too, one advances to the heart of things.”

Ex-CIA man Max Rushmore travels to a still-peaceful Odesa on routine assignment. But things veer off course when the severed hand of the local governor shows up in a vat of sunflower oil. Max stumbles across a solitary toe, with the same tell-tale markings. The downsized professional can’t help himself – he has to investigate.With the Russian threat in the background, Max’s quest takes him down to the crumbling underbelly of the beautiful Black Sea port city, once the Russian Empire’s glittering third capital. It leads him to dubious businessmen, corrupt officials, catacomb dwellers, scientists, pastry-chefs, poets, archivists, cops – and killers. As global political tensions rise, Max begins to untangle the threads of the case. But he is also being tracked – and not just by Odesa’s network of mafia-minded stray cats, who may be the only ones who really know what’s going on. In this surreal contemporary spin on the classic spy thriller, Sally McGrane pays tribute to one-time Odesa residents like Babel, Gogol, Pushkin and Chekhov, creating a darkly witty, beguiling and bizarre work of fiction like nothing before.

Amal shocks the whole neighbourhood by beating up her classmate Younes. Her father defends her behaviour and encourages her to assert herself. From then on everyone avoids Amal – and then her father leaves. Searching in vain for an explanation, Amal finds refuge with Younes and his mother Shahira, both outsiders like her. Years later, when the situation comes to a head and the conflict with Raffiq’s gang escalates, Amal flees to Kurdistan to look for her father.Raffiq’s friend Younes is the reluctant centre of attention in their neighbourhood – thanks to his free-spirited mother Shahira, who breaks all the rules. Raffiq thinks about Shahira all the time, at once fascinated and repulsed by her. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Younes plans to leave. When Raffiq’s girlfriend Amal also wants to move away, Raffiq’s world begins to break apart.In her kaleidoscopic novel, Karosh Taha expands our ideas of class, race and gender as she loops two stories around an invisible lynchpin: a woman who defies all expectations, a blank canvas for projections from all those around her. Deftly translated by Grashina Gabelmann, the book can be explored from either end, creating two very different narratives. ‘This is the tight, urgent style of an author who genuinely has something to say.’ Stefanie Roenneke, Neues Deutschland

‘There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.’ After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gül’s life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim Özdoğan’s account of Gül’s journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds.‘Anchored in the circumstances of this century and yet timeless, this is the story of exiles and homecomings, of silences and distances and loneliness but with a hopefulness at its heart. Above all it is a story about women and age: an old woman’s careful, thoughtful, analytic eye reflecting on motherhood, friendship, marriage, survival. This book is full of wisdom.’ Jane Campbell, author of Cat Brushing

At a conference, the graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe is accused of cultural appropriation. Is she exploiting her privileges as a white writer when she tells stories about Black people?She tries a new approach with Priscilla Layne, an African American professor of German studies with Caribbean roots. Growing up, Priscilla is labelled an ‘Oreo’: too white for her Black classmates, too Black for the white kids. By joining the skinhead movement and becoming a rude girl, she discovers a community where she feels valued. Music, clothes, hair, food, class, race, gender, education – her life and identity are a complex composite.