Anton and Alma

Anton and Alma meet for the first time as exchange students in France. Years later, they run into each other at a party. They both grew up in Berlin and are studying at the same university – but that’s about all they have in common. Anton comes from a privileged background, while Alma grew up out in the suburbs of the former East with her mum and her unloving stepfather. Anton is Jewish. Alma isn’t. But they fall in love, move in together, they fight, they make up, and then fight and make up again, before Anton moves to New York to do a Master’s about the mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. Alma stays in Berlin, heartbroken, and finds solace in Anton’s Jewish community. After October 7th, 2023, the war in Gaza, and with escalating tensions on campus and within his own family, Anton returns to Berlin and to Alma, with whom he finds a kind of refuge. But a tragic turn of events changes everything.

Anton and Alma tells the story of a great love in an increasingly divided world. A story about grief and loss, faith and belonging – and about how we all try to imbue our lives with meaning. A heartbreaking, courageous novel about what it means to be human.

»What a beautiful, tragic, intelligent book. I've been missing Anton and Alma ever since I finished the last page.« Verena Keßler

»It is just phenomenal how Vowinckel makes the irresolvable conflicts of our time, the shockwaves of politics and war echo in this love story, how she brings life to the debates of our time, tells them as a story, how she virtually writes a social novel of our epoch in real time.« Volker Weidermann, DIE ZEIT

»It’s a small miracle that Vowinckel manages to fit all these themes into a single novel – and that this book has not turned into a roman à these, but is a story about two people who find each other, lose each other, and find each another again. … Funny, tragic, and intelligent.« Tobias Rapp, DER SPIEGEL

»In a virtuosic manner, Dana Vowinckel's new novel develops a critical portrait of society out of a romantic story.« Uwe Sauerwein, Berliner Morgenpost

»With Anton and Alma, Dana Vowinckel displays for the second time an amazing confidence as a storyteller...« Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Anton and Alma … belongs in the front row of contemporary literature in German, and also … puts the author right there too. Judith von Sternburg, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Dana Vowinckel has written two novels that exhibit a real sureness of hand as a storyteller, because she manages to tell of the tensions between parents and children, of chaos, happiness, and the conflicts of growing up, including those that come with our first real love.« Tobias Rüther, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»With Anton and Alma, Dana Vowinckel has definitively written herself into the front row of contemporary German literature. Also in the sense that rarely has so much of the present moment, with all its pervasive complexity, found space in a (love) novel« Daniel Graf, Republik

»Through her fiction, Vowinckel picks up on fears that preoccupy so many of us. But instead of relieving the readers of these fears, the story escalates at the end in an expectable – and yet also unexpectable – way. When Anton says: ›forever my Alma‹, it’s a line that will echo on for quite some time after reading the last page.« Josephine Danneberg, t-online.de

»Some of Vowinckel’s sentences are so beautiful that you want to write them down and hang them above your own bed.« Katharina Bellgardt-Karis, Westfälischer Anzeiger

»A unique sound that gets under your skin.« SWR

»Tender, highly political, and timely.« Barbara Gärtner, DONNA

»The story of Anton and Alma and how they try to find themselves and be a couple at the same time had me transfixed for nights on end.« Bettina Klee, Gala