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The Nameless Day

A Case for Jakob Franck
Novel
Translation SampleSuhrkamp | Insel
Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Italy (Emons), Greece (Gutenberg)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Entire Radio Readings (HR and BR)


The Nameless Day / Der namenlose Tag
A Case for Jakob Franck
Novel

German Crime Fiction Prize 2016

Top Crime Novel of the Year 2015 (KrimiZEIT)

Adapted into a TV movie by Oscar-winner Volker Schlöndorff

Detective Chief Superintendent Jakob Franck has been retired for two months and feels that he can now start to lead a life in which he leaves behind the dead - until a case from his past catches up with him.

Franck was the detective responsible for bringing the news of their relatives’ death to the bereaved, a task he carried out stoically, calm and collected. But twenty years ago, he comforted the mother of a dead seventeen-year-old girl, for hours, through the...
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Detective Chief Superintendent Jakob Franck has been retired for two months and feels that he can now start to lead a life in which he leaves behind the dead - until a case from his past catches up with him.

Franck was the detective responsible for bringing the news of their relatives’ death to the bereaved, a task he carried out stoically, calm and collected. But twenty years ago, he comforted the mother of a dead seventeen-year-old girl, for hours, through the night, without saying a word. And as he begins to enjoy retirement, he is contacted by Ludwig Winther, the father of the girl and husband of the woman that Franck devoted so much attention to back then. Twenty years have passed, and Winther still doesn’t believe that his daughter killed herself, despite an unambiguous report by the medical examiner. According to him, his daughter’s death can’t have been anything but murder. Former police detective Jakob Franck begins to shed light upon the particulars of the young girl’s death, starts to »bring a dead case back to life«. In doing so, he follows his very own method of »Gedankenfühligkeit«, a sensory-conceptual abstraction of facts and thoughts guided by intuition - a method that is inimitable and unsurpassed when it comes to solving the most complicated and surprising cases.


This psychological crime novel is the start of a series revolving around the former Detective Chief Superintendent Jakob Franck. Multi-award winning author Friedrich Ani and his mastery in constructing common and simultaneously extraordinary criminalistic puzzles, Friedrich Ani and his prose that throws new perspectives, melancholically dissociated, from death onto life – Friedrich Ani and his art reach unforeseen dimensions in this novel.

»Full of tenderness and compassion – a bestseller. Without a doubt.« Die Welt

»More empathetic than Sherlock Holmes […] This understanding for and immersion into the crime contrasts with the procedure that Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have taught the crime readers […] If you engage with Jakob Franck’s total empathy, you can learn a lot about people in their forlornness.« NZZ am Sonntag

»Great compassion with the suffering that never turns corny is what distinguishes Ani’s prose.« DIE ZEIT

»[H]is crime novel – that is so much more than that: it is great literature that can be read like crime fiction – is masterfully written. […] In the end, you close a book that you read, devoured in one go, in order to bow to Ani and embrace Franck.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Friedrich Ani is constantly referred to as the best German crime novelist. And yet, he still managed to improve on his own œuvre with his new investigator, Jakob Franck. This book hurts and delights at the same time, because it reads so authentic. […] And so this novel is a crime story, truly gripping, yet also a novel about isolation through pain, about comfort through intense closeness, but, at the same time, not without self-irony when a subtle humour shows through the character of Franck.« Bücher Magazin

»a truly wonderful novel […] The dread […] appears silent and ordinary and is all the more shocking for it.« Spiegel Online

»The strength of Ani’s story does not lie within the nail-biting thrill of suspense, but once again within the in-depth access into the emotional world of his protagonists.« Berliner Morgenpost Online

»... an intense, suspenseful journey into the darker realms of the soul.« Abendzeitung München

»This first case is intelligently constructed and heavy stuff – not because it draws its readers in with nerve-racking suspense or excessive action, but because it delves further and further into the depths of the human psyche on a high literary level.« Nürnberger Nachrichten

»an extraordinary criminal puzzle […] Where language is concerned, this crime novel towers high above the average of the genre.« Sächsische Zeitung

»It’s these intimate observations, those profound, casually annotated descriptions of mental states and a humour that sometimes shrouds the horror and makes it almost forgivable, that make Friedrich Ani a great author of crime fiction.« Hamburger Abendblatt

»Ani shows that beautiful prose, poetry, smashing mastery of dialogues, wisdom, accuracy devoted to the [description of the] present and the format of the crisp short crime novel aren’t mutually exclusive, and that there can be a legitimate successor of Dürrenmatt in this field.« Die Welt

»An entirely wonderful novel of great sadness and delicate lightness.« Frankfurter Neue Presse

»The abysses behind the façade of bourgeois life could be described in a better way than Friedrich Ani’s. And there is no better observer than Ani far and wide.« Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung

»[The Nameless Day has] a plot that beats the average crime novels, of which there is a dime a dozen, by far.« P.S., die linke Zürcher Zeitung

»The Nameless Day is a magnificent novel, a book that out of all German crime novelists could only have been written by […] Ani. Though and realistic, moving and carried by a sadness that makes it difficult for the reader to return to his reality beyond literature. No crime novel in the general sense of the term, but a journey to the margins – those of society, those of life, those of humanity.« Dietmar Jacobsen, TITEL kulturmagazin

»Full of tenderness and compassion – a bestseller. Without a doubt.« Die Welt

»More empathetic than Sherlock Holmes […] This understanding for and immersion into the crime contrasts with the procedure that Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have taught the crime readers […] If you engage with Jakob Franck’s total empathy, you can learn a lot about people in their forlornness.« NZZ am Sonntag...

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Persons

Friedrich Ani was born in 1959. His first novel was published in 1996, and since then he has gone on to write crime novels, poetry and YA-fiction, as well as writing for TV, radio and theatre. He is an award-winning script writer, while his books have also received many prominent awards. So far, he is the only author ever to receive the German Crime Fiction Prize for three titles in the same year (2003).

Friedrich Ani was born in 1959. His first novel was published in 1996, and since then he has gone on to write crime novels, poetry and YA-fiction,...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Light Years in the Dark
Year of Publication: 2024
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2024
A shopkeeper who had big plans for the future has disappeared. His wife thinks her dreams are over. Then there’s the former owner of a removals business with a guilt complex, and a mysterious visitor from the Berlin demimonde. The fates of all these characters intersect in Munich, in a turn of events that causes all their lives to go off the rails.

Leo Ahorn has disappeared. And yet,...
Pen
Year of Publication: 2024
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2024

A narrator, possibly a former monk, looks back on his life: there wasn’t any real space for childhood and youth in it, his father and mother did not play the role intended for them. His path led him from faith to doubt, from the village to the city. He escaped the city into the solitude of his hermitage, where he tries to put into words what leaves him bewildered, investigates the...

Bull’s Eye
Year of Publication: 2022
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2022

Police officer Kay Oleander was hit in the face with a beer bottle during a demonstration and lost his left eye as a result. Released from active duty, he struggles to get through the day – until fate leads him to Silvia Glaser. She, too, has been disabled ever since a bicycle accident. Unexpectedly, the two find support in each other – despite the fact that she is suspected of...

Last Respects
Year of Publication: 2021
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2021

Seventeen-year-old Finja Madsen fails to come home after a party one night. There are no witnesses, no clues as to what happened to her. The investigation is at a dead end. Inspector Fariza Nasri interviews family and friends of the missing girl, including her mother’s boyfriend Stephan Barig. The party was at his house while he spent the weekend in the countryside with two friends. Barig...

All the Empty Rooms
Year of Publication: 2019
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2019

In Friedrich Ani’s new novel, »the four« must spring into action: Polonius Fischer (the former monk), Tabor Süden (the returned missing person’s investigator), Jakob Franck (the former inspector, now retired, but still the deliverer of the worst news) and Fariza Nasri (the detective with Syrian roots, saved from her banishment to the provinces). All of them must...

The Fool and His Machine
Year of Publication: 2018
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2018

Tabor Süden started out as a policeman before moving into private detective work, becoming an experienced specialist in missing persons cases. What he really wanted was to walk away forever from investigative work after the last case in which one of his colleagues lost his life.


Süden plans to leave Munich with no goodbyes. However, when his boss catches him at the railway station,...

Killing Happiness
Year of Publication: 2017
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2017

Happiness is extinguished completely when 11-year-old Lennard Grabbe doesn’t come home one night during the cold November days in Munich. 34 days later, he is found the victim of a murderer....

Rights sold to:

English world rights (Seagull), Italy (Emons)

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg), German Radio Drama (Deutschlandfunk Kultur)

In My Father's Room
Year of Publication: 2017
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2017

Poetry owes many evergreens to »occasional poems«. In the case of Friedrich Ani, such poems constitute deliberate addressing, musically worded compositions if one considers current political-individual situations the occasion to which one must react immediately, showing oneself and the counterpart in all its vulnerability. These realistic-spontaneous sounds find very different forms: from the...

Naked Man Burning
Year of Publication: 2016
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2016

At the age of fourteen, a boy flees from the southern German village of Heiligsheim. Forty years later, he returns under the name of Ludwig »Luggi« Dragomir. The tough times he has had to...

Rights sold to:

Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Hörbuch Hamburg)

The Air Guitarist
Year of Publication: 2003
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2003
At the city’s vey first Air Guitar Championships, Süden’s colleague Martin Heuer comes second in the preliminary round – when suddenly his toughest competitor disappears without a trace. Together with Süden and the team from Department 11, Heuer sets out on a search: they find a suicide note and a woman who is deaf and understands everything, but doesn’t want to...
The Queen’s Secret
Year of Publication: 2002
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2002
When investigation the death of a man who starved to death in a seemingly deserted house, the CID comes across the name of a woman: Soraya Roos. This brings Inspector Tabor Süden to the scene, the expert for missing persons, because ten years ago Soraya left her family from one day to the next and has been considered missing ever since. Süden starts searching for her once more and...
The Woman with the Austere Dress
Year of Publication: 2002
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2002
Johann Farak, 41, son of an Egyptian, has disappeared. But apart from his sister, no one seems to miss him. He was a drunkard, they say, he painted pictures on wooden boards that were no good. Then a mysterious young woman turns up – and Inspector Tabor Süden suddenly realises what a sad life Johann Farak has led so far and that perhaps he had no choice but to leave this life behind ...
The Streetcar Drinker
Year of Publication: 2002
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2002
Tabor Süden is on leave, reducing accrued overtime and doing little else but letting himself drift along the streets of Munich. But then he is unexpectedly called to Department 11: A man is...
Rights sold to:

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Plataforma)

The Promise of the Fallen Angel
Year of Publication: 2001
Friedrich AniYear of Publication: 2001
Maximilian Grauke has left his wife without explanation. A shoemaker who wants to leave his monotonous life behind – or so it seems. But this is not the first time Grauke has disappeared. And...
Rights sold to:

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Plataforma)


DISCOVER

Just published
We are delighted to present to you our latest arrivals!
Just published
We are delighted to present to you our latest arrivals!
News
21.01.2016
We are proud to announce that Friedrich Ani is this year’s winner of the German Crime Fiction Prize.