Book of the month 2009

Two sisters, different as chalk and cheese, the older one rational and lenient, the younger one aggressive and nagging, are travelling through Bulgaria, a country despised by them, the former homeland of their father. Their Bulgarian driver, Rumen Apostoloff, is always keen to praise his country, but he falls on deaf ears with the younger sister, More ...

A memorial service for the deceased teacher Stella Petersen is taking place in the auditorium of a gymnasium in a town on the Baltic Coast. The entire school congregation looks in deep mourning at the photograph of the young woman, equally well-liked by students and teachers. More ...

Dresden, February 1945: “The night it rained dead birds.” It will change the life of eleven-year-old Hermann Funk radically. The boy and his parents fled ahead of the advance of the Red Army from Posen to Dresden. He alone will survive the bombing inferno that will turn him into the protégé and scholar of the great Austrian zoologist Ludwig Kaltenburg. Born in 1903, Kaltenburg worked as a biologist in Posen at the end of the nineteen-thirties. More ...

My grandmother’s name was Fatma (…). Now Fatma was dying, and we went in a rush from Germany to Anatolia, to see our grandmother once again”.
The first novel by the German-Turk author Dilek Güngör, which is more or less the history of her family, deals with an encounter of the in Geramany grown up Turkish woman Zeynep in her thirties and her dying grandmother, who lieves in Turkey.

More ...