European Literature Night 2025

Transcending national and generational boundaries with her rare combination of moral wisdom and down-to-earth manner of speaking to us, Wisława Szymborska is unquestionably one of the great poetic spirits of the age. She received thePolish PEN Club prize, the Goethe Prize, the Herder Prize and finally the NOBEL Prize.

1945. Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno. Gerta Schnirch, a daughter of a Czech mother and a German father, was expelled from Czechoslovakia, her own home country. The powerful novel asks painful questions about guilt, revenge and forgiveness between the Czechs and Germans.

What did the disintegration of the Soviet Union feel like for the people who lived through it? Glorious People is a vivid depiction of how two women started a new life in Germany with their daughters after the collapse of their home country.

The City of Mist is an extraordinary collection that offers eleven brief but vivid glimpses into the hidden corners of Barcelona, past and present. The book is Ruiz Zafon's tribute to the countless thousands of readers who joined him on the extraordinary journey through the mysterious gothic world of his beloved Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet.

Perfection is a story of a young Italian couple moving to Berlin for the perfect life. But beneath the carefully crafted surface, cracks begin to appear. A portrait of modern urban life in the age of Instagram - where appearances are everything, and nothing is quite as it seems.

"The story of a photographer who… No. The story of a man who… No. The story of a love affair that… Or the story of several love affairs that taken together… Or the story of a nation that… Ah, forget it. This novel offers everything that a novel can possibly offer: truth, sincerity, atmosphere, story.

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence.

In the utterly original, genre-defying, Fishing for the Little Pike, a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce – from a child grappling with the death of a fallen priest, to a young woman's dilemma over whether to elope to Argentina with her lover, to the dance party at which a man discovers just how little he really knows about his wife. This book presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish life in Dublin in the early 20th century.

The story revisits an ostensibly closed murder in April 1999, when young Alaska Sanders was found dead by a lake in New Hampshire and her killer swiftly convicted. Eleven years later, the case is reexamined again after a mysterious note casts doubt on the verdict.

The Factory by poet and prose writer Ihor Mysiak, translated by Yevheniia Dubrova and Hanna Leliv, was published in its original Ukrainian in 2022, dedicated to the author’s friend who was killed by Russia while defending his home.

In an unnamed country, on the first day of the New Year, people stop dying. There is great celebration and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life.

Inspired by the life of her father and by her lifelong effort to understand him, Amélie Nothomb’s new novel is about life-and-death decisions, about reckoning with one’s past, reconciling with one’s parents, and about the hard, often humorous work of determining one’s own path.