Fiction

ZDF »aspekte« Literary Prize 2025

»This novel will break your heart – and yet, it makes you want to love like Zeko does, just once in your life.« Mithu Sanyal

When Jina Mahsa Amini is murdered by the morality police in Tehran in 2022 and the world’s first ever women-led revolution breaks out in Iran, the narrator, also called Jina, is confronted by...

»Every true and luminous short story also casts a novel-length shadow”, Ralf Rothmann once wrote, and The Museum of Solitude provides the proof for this assertion. Whether he’s talking about the “shindig” held by a young boy who consoles his crying brother while their parents are away or about a lecturer who takes her mother to a nursing home with strange scratch marks on the doors,...

On the way back to his little shack on a vineyard near the Black Forest, the narrator receives a phone call that turns his world upside down. His partner Ina has had a serious accident while freediving. She is placed in an induced coma, and nobody knows whether she has suffered brain damage, whether she will ever wake up again at all. In the days that follow, he is terrified that she won’t...

A state is founded, like all states, for eternity, but disappears after forty years, almost without a trace. Are the people who once lived there condemned to oblivion, their dreams just a brief...

»The trams haven’t been running since February.« Time and again, we encounter moments of calm in this city haunted by the spectre of war. People meet up in places that are still more or less...

Number 36 and 37, they lived here side by side for years. As a child, she would play table tennis on the glass-topped table in her grandparents’ apartment. As an adult, she eventually has to clear...