Suhrkamp Insel

Friedrich Ani

Last Respects

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 diligently cooperates. Nasri listens, asks questions – and is suddenly certain that the man is lying. But was he really involved in Finja’s disappearance or is he hiding something else entirely?

Polina Barskova

Living Pictures

They refuse to seek shelter in the cellar and wait it out in the dark, draughty art gallery, defying the cold and the hunger. Mojsej, 25, and Antonina, 37, work at Leningrad’s Hermitage, one of the most beautiful museums of fine arts in the world. In the winter of 1941/42, it becomes their last refuge.

Priya Basil

In Us and Now

This book is a search. For a position, a community, a perspective. Led by the memories of what she experienced as the daughter of a patriarchal Indian family, Priya Basil describes the oppression of women, as well as their incredible resourcefulness, and discusses the questions that need to be answered on the way to justice and equality. In Us and Now is at once a self-discovery of elegant beauty and brilliant analysis.

Zoë Beck

Paradise City

Germany in the near future. The coasts are flooded, large parts of the country are depopulated and nature is reclaiming deserted communities. Berlin is nothing but a backdrop for tourists. The government has moved to Frankfurt, which has merged with the entire Rhine Main Area to become one single megacity. In those places where infrastructure exists, it works flawlessly. Virtually all life is controlled by algorithms. Everyone is fine – as long as they don’t ask any questions.

Gernot Böhme, Rebecca Böhme

On the Unease of Wealth

We are living in a state of continuously growing wealth and have been enjoying more than 70 years of democracy and peace. But instead of satisfaction, many experience a feeling of unease. The demands for performance in our workplace take over our leisure time, complaints about insomnia and depression can be heard in all parts of society. How did that happen? Gernot and Rebecca Böhme examine sources of unease in our environment in an interdisciplinary cooperation. There are large-scale changes that should be made, but the individual cannot wait for that to happen.

Nora Bossong

Tomorrow Too

Be it in her award-winning novels, reportages or essays – Nora Bossong’s texts unfailingly take us straight into the painfully relevant problems areas of our time. Where others make snap judgement or withdraw into themselves, she looks closely, listens with compassion and asks questions: about colonial guilt and global justice, about the West’s claims to power and the nature of evil.

Simone Buchholz

River Clyde

State prosecutor Chastity Riley runs off to Glasgow. Because, for one, there is that letter, written by a lawyer, that lures her to the birthplace of her great-great-grandfather. And secondly, her life in Hamburg has arrived at a sad impasse. In the rough Scottish city she meets Tom, who knows the key that unlocks the Rileys’ family secret – a panorama of violence and loss. She had always had a hunch about this but never dared confront the painful truths about herself. Now, a great amount of whisky and a few ghosts help her to do just that after all.

Gabriele Diechler

The Island of Roses

Bookseller Emma travels to London to be close to her deceased parents one more time, because that’s where they had met and fallen in love.

Annette Dufner

Whose Life Should We Save?

How should resources such as donor organs be distributed among patients on the waiting list? Who should receive a ventilator during the pandemic, if there are more patients than intensive care unit beds? This book addresses recent approaches to distributive justice under conditions of scarcity. In scenarios in which not everybody in need can receive help there is often a tension between efficiency and fairness.

Ulrike Edschmid

Levy’s Testament

They meet in Berlin but in London they become a couple. They spend their days in a court room at the Old Bailey, to support anarchists facing draconian prison sentences. Strikes, squatting, IRA attacks and the tough measures taken by the government shape everyday life in the winter of 1972. The couple explore the city, floating through it weightlessly as though in a dream. The Englishman (as the narrator calls her companion) knows little about his Jewish family. Decades later, after they have already been separated for many years, the Englishman uncovers a family drama. It takes him back to the Old Bailey: to 1924, to a spectacular fraud case, in which the accused is Levy, his great-grandfather.

Oswald Egger

Either I Only Dreamt the Journey Along the Mississippi Or I’m Dreaming Now

Does everything flow? Like a progressively osculating billowing jumble in the form of words and forms without words, swirlings, dispersions and clusters of waves of reveries breaking in on themselves, flowing past the riverbanks of an internal landscape.

Peter Fabjan

A Life Alongside Thomas Bernhard

»You’ll just have to do it in my stead,« Thomas Bernhard instructs his half-brother Peter Fabjan when he senses that he doesn’t have long to live. And the brother, seven years his junior, obeys and accepts responsibility, this time for a difficult legacy – just as he has always done, ever since he was young, when his older brother needed him. To him, he was »the kind brother,« whereas Fabjan considers himself more as a »helper in times of need,« for it was often enough that he found himself playing the role of driver and servant who sat at the side table while his brother chatted with famous politicians and celebrities from the art world.

Julia Glesner

Opera for Everyone

Not only was he an opera star, he was also one of the most fascinating people of his time: Sir Peter Jonas, an impressive figure, elegant, quirky, funny. With a family story that exemplifies the turmoil of the 20th century.

Johannes Groschupf

Berlin Heat

Berlin is boiling hot in the first summer after the pandemic. The tourists are back in Party City, there are excessive parties everywhere, people are enjoying the time after the lockdown. Good business for Tom Lohoff, the facilitator, who has apartments, all kinds of drugs, sex and access to top clubs on offer for the party crowd from all over the world. And he has large gambling debts with a local gangster who runs a brutal gang. Tom, a gambling addict since his teens, needs money, no matter where from, even if he has to lie and cheat and steal from his last remaining friend and his father.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

»The Prose of the World«

Philosopher and translator, critic and writer, art agent and encyclopaedist: Denis Diderot, born in Champagne in 1713, died in Paris in 1784, was one of the defining figures of the movement that went down in history as the European Age of Enlightenment. But what is the vanishing point of his multifarious œuvre, which is characterised by downright centrifugal dynamics – unlike the works of his contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau, Schiller, Kant and Hume?

Peter Handke

My Day in the Other Country

His surroundings see him as a man possessed, »possessed not just by one, but by several, many, even countless demons«. During the day, he, a fruit grower by profession, walks through the village. Quietly he speaks in tongues, a non-existent language, scares the villagers with insults and abuse, with prophesies.

Petra Hardt

Loving at a Distance

Loving at a Distance talks about the author’s experiences in the hotspots of the high-tech sector in California: the Silicon Valley and the college towns of Berkeley and Stanford. The regular transatlantic journeys to visit her children and grandchildren in California aren’t really helping the grandmother understand the Californian way of life and work.

Christoph Hein

Guldenberg

In the small town of Bad Guldenberg the world is still alright. At least until a group of underage immigrants is given accommodation in the Old Seglerheim. The people of Guldenberg agree: The strangers simply don’t fit in and are causing nothing but trouble. As tensions rise, there are rude remarks and provocations and when the rumour that a young woman was raped spreads, everyone soon agrees that it must have been one of the young immigrants. And the people of Guldenberg will not stand for that…

Rafael Horzon

The New Book

Ten years after Rafael Horzon’s successful autobiography The White Book not much has been reported about the former darling of Berlin’s intelligentsia. It’s become too quiet, in his opinion. And so, he brings himself to try once more: With a new book, he wants to set himself up as the most important intellectual of the 21st century; indeed, even finally win the much longed-for Nobel Prize. But he can’t think of anything to write about.

Hans Joas

Under the Spell of Freedom

How do the history of religion and the history of political freedom relate to one another? The diversity of opinions on this in the fields of philosophy, the humanities and social sciences and in the public is vast and confusing. And yet, the sublime synthesis in which Hegel once united Christianity and political freedom is still of enormous guiding power for many – despite or maybe because of Friedrich Nietzsche’s influential provocations.