Search results for ""V Q Books""

The white German graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe meets Priscilla Layne, an African American professor of German studies. Growing up, Priscilla is too white for her Black classmates, too Black for the white kids. She becomes a rude girl, discovering a community where she feels valued. But how should Birgit Weyhe tell a life story like Priscilla's?

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Ex-CIA man Max Rushmore travels to a still-peaceful Odesa on routine assignment. But things veer off course when the severed hand of the local governor shows up in a vat of sunflower oil. Max stumbles across a solitary toe, with the same tell-tale markings. The downsized professional can't help himself - he has to investigate. With the Russian threat in the background, Max's quest takes him down to the crumbling underbelly of the beautiful Black Sea port city, once the Russian Empire's glittering third capital. It leads him to dubious businessmen, corrupt officials, catacomb dwellers, scientists, pastry-chefs, poets, archivists, cops - and killers. As global political tensions rise, Max begins to untangle the threads of the case. But he is also being tracked - and not just by Odesa's network of mafia-minded stray cats, who may be the only ones who really know what's going on. In this surreal contemporary spin on the classic spy thriller, Sally McGrane pays tribute to one-time Odesa residents like Babel, Gogol, Pushkin and Chekhov, creating a darkly witty, beguiling and bizarre work of fiction like nothing before. Tokarczuk meets Bulgakov meets Le Carre, in this affectionate portrait of a complex and fascinating city. "Odesa at Dawn lives in that special place where noir meets the absurd. If you cherish that space - and why wouldn't you? - this book is for you." Dan Vyleta, author of Soot and Smoke; "By turns sober, then wild and mysterious, with occasional excursions into the fantastic. As if Lewis Carroll's Alice and Isaac Babel's legendary gangster Benya Krik had met up for new tales from Odesa." Peter Koerte, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; "A political thriller with feline protagonists? Can that possibly work? It shouldn't, but in the case of Sally McGrane's Odesa at Dawn it does. Very well, in fact." Deutschlandfunk Kultur

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"There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee." After eight years in Turkey, Gul leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gul's life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim OEzdogan's account of Gul's journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds. "Selim Oezdogan's latest novel is an affectionate testament to a whole generation of women who are often overlooked. Gul has many names and many faces." Steffen Radlmaier, Nurnberger Nachrichten "A luminous conclusion to a trilogy that has no equal in any language. Through the story of one woman who insists, against the odds, on meeting the world with an open heart, it brings grace and dignity to the many unsung millions whose lives have followed the same zigzagging paths between Turkey and Germany over three generations." Maureen Freely, author of Sailing Through Byzantium and translator of Orhan Pamuk

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Told with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in rural 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother’s early death. Ever close to her loving father, Gül grows into a warm-hearted, hard-working young woman. The Blacksmith’s Daughter is a novel full of carefree summers and hard winters, old wives’ tales and young people’s ambitions – the melancholy beauty and pain of an ordinary life. ‘Reading it was like falling in love. If everyone read this book, the world would be a better place – more considerate, more liveable, more tolerant.’ 
Fatih Akın, director of The Edge of Heaven; ‘The book’s muted poetry all the way to its quiet ending warms the soul like later summer wind gently stroking through hair.’ Sächsische Zeitung; ‘The novel enchants its readers with the sincerity and love with which it assesses the weight of the simple things in life.’ Fachdienst Germanistik; ‘A mature, light, wise book.’ Kreuzer magazine

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Each of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it's the crimes of the Nazi era, which have hurt him for as long as he can remember. That's why he became an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management; now, though, he's wondering if he should make a change. For his best friend, Graziela, that past was also her focal point - until she met a man who desired her. From then on, sexual pleasure became the key to her life; a concept she's now beginning to doubt. Hans and Graziela thought the Nazi crimes were the inheritance that neither could bear, but can we really blame Nazism for everything? Iris Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their clutches to this day. Can a country manage its past, or ought we to remain helpless in the face of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust? "A brave account of one man's struggle to come to terms with his nation's past, which draws an artful distinction between memory and memorial.' Michael Arditti; "A bold and absorbing novel (...) translated sensitively by Abigail Wender." Irish Times; "It's impossible to live with this guilt. Making that so emphatically clear by means of fiction, after sixty-five years of intense debate, is this novel's great achievement." Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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"...particularly peculiar, breath-taking and worth telling." Alexander Solloch, NDR Kultur. Francis Nenik's thrilling slice of narrative non-fiction is about the life of the forgotten writer Hasso Grabner, told with great joy in language and love of absurdity. The journey takes us from the Young Communists in 1920s Leipzig to wartime Crete, with Grabner falling from steelworks director to a vilified author banned from publishing his work in the GDR.

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"Splendid. Uproariously funny and movingly beautiful." Der Spiegel. Lucy Fricke's Daughters tells the story of two women, pushing forty, on a road trip across Europe, each of them dealing with difficult fathers along the way. A bestseller and booksellers' favourite in Germany, Daughters evokes laughter and tears by way of life and death, friendship and family.

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"Sandra Hoffmann is one of Germany's most exciting contemporary writers. [...] An incredibly dense, finely woven text that immediately grabs you and pulls you mercilessly in." Brigitte Woman. Sandra Hoffmann's "Paula" is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer's relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce?

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Madgermanes is what the Mozambican workers once contracted out to East Germany are called today. At the end of the 1970s, some 20,000 of them were sent from the People's Republic of Mozambique to the GDR to labour for their socialist sister country. After the Berlin Wall fell, almost all of them lost their residency status. Decades later, they are still waiting for most of their wages to be paid. Birgit Weyhe depicts their search for belonging and a place to call home, caught between two cultures and two states that no longer exist. Based on extensive interviews, she creates three fictitious narrators and transforms their stories into a visual language that skilfully interweaves African and European narrative traditions. "Birgit Weyhe traces emotions and situations, translating them into overwhelming images by entering into an artistic dialogue between European and African culture." Max and Moritz Prize; "This book is a great document and a monument to the injustice that befell me and other contract workers in East Germany." Emiliano Chaimite

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"You'll live out your lives in a foreign country," Gul is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you're far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return. Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gul will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father the blacksmith, for scents and colours and fruit. Yet imperceptibly, Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home. A novel about how home is found in many places and yet still eludes us. "A modern-day fairy tale." NDR "An absolutely recommended novel that quietly stimulates the reader's thoughts and portrays the hard work behind seeing a new country as home." migazin "A unique novel about the losses, sacrifices and determination of generations of migrant women; as important as it is moving." Preti Taneja

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Eight essays on literature, language, art, Europe and life from one of Germany's most revered living writers. After a visit to Putin's old postbox, the reader is taken to Dresden and Brixton, Gdansk and Minsk, diverted to birds, bees, stray cats and pet dogs, confronted with Stasi and KGB, Proust and Jah Shaka, puzzled by overcoats and anoraks, Francis Bacon and Vermeer, and lost (then found) in service stations and memorial centres. Throughout, Marcel Beyer forges unexpected links and makes unpredictable leaps. "I work from the margins, partly very literally as I build my sentences, for instance when I start with the name of a colour rather than a noun, to explore how the sentence might be steered from there to a subject. In my reading, I am drawn to the outliers or, as malicious claims would have it, to the obscure. Central books: that is, those everyone can agree on, have never much interested me. I am rarely tempted to explore the centre of my world in writing, and even if I did want to encroach upon a centre, I would have to choose a path from the outside. But outside, too, one advances to the heart of things." Inspired by the great W. G. Sebald, Beyer's playful literary investigations wend through the high points and horrors of Europe's artistic history, towards a profoundly personal conclusion. "Reading Beyer, you begin to look more closely at the things around you and to be more patient in trusting your own associations and digressions." Literarische Welt; "In the geographical movement eastwards, the decades after 1989 take shape in a wealth of acoustic, visual and atmospheric perceptions: fonts, posters, buildings, modes of transport are witnesses as important as the people themselves." Suddeutsche Zeitung; "Beyer traces similarities, adjacencies, succeeding over and over in interrelating ostensibly disparate themes and objects, words and images." Deutschlandfunk; "Marcel Beyer is a wonderfully clear- sighted storyteller. His writing is breezy and intelligent and always carries its double and deeper meaning with it." Bayern 2 Radio

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"A delicious read." Aachener Zeitung Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what’s going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan’s book is a big hitter in Germany – and now it’s coming home to roost. "A peacock whodunnit meets Monarch of the Glen. Light-hearted and fun, to be enjoyed by the fire, with a whisky, of course. In Annie Rutherford’s translation, it’s hard to imagine it was originally written in German." Kari Dickson, translator of Karin Fossum "A charming, slightly madcap novel." Much Ado Books

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Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us into a war between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed Dante scholar, is trying to change the world and write a novel. She, a passable actress, has given up her safe job at the theatre to care for their child. He is delirious, she is on edge. With the rent overdue and violence looming on all sides, the two of them circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss. "Wow, what an incredible novel. The language! Thank you for publishing this book." Katja Schneider, stories! bookshop, Hamburg "Words and images to take your breath away." taz; "The experiences so original, the observations so sharp, the thoughts so clever." Frankfurter Rundschau; "A sound that tells of political and economic vacuums felt by people in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia to this day." MDR Kultur; "The interpersonal magic now lost, or at least forgotten, but above all: poisoned by the big bad world 'out there'. Ivana Sajko celebrates this sad state of affairs with power and intensity. Definitely worth reading." NDR Kultur; "Breathless, barely punctuated. Her heroes: a nameless couple in a Mediterranean nowhere, devoted to each other in hate. A tough, great novel." Neue Presse

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"A provocative and knotty debut." The New York Times Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a doctoral student who blogs about race with the help of Hindu goddess Kali, is in awe of Saraswati, her superstar postcolonial and race studies professor. But Nivedita's life and sense of self are upturned when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Hours before she learns the truth Nivedita praises her tutor in a radio interview, which calls into question her own reputation and ignites an angry backlash among her peers and online community. In her thought-provoking, genre-bending debut, Mithu Sanyal collages the commentary of real-life intellectuals, blogs, articles, race theory, academic warfare and coming-of-age drama. A darkly comedic tour de force, Identitti showcases the outsized power of social media in the current debates around identity politics and the power of claiming your own voice.

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Amal shocks the whole neighbourhood by beating up her classmate Younes. Her father defends her behaviour and encourages her to assert herself. From then on everyone avoids Amal - and then her father leaves. Searching in vain for an explanation, Amal finds refuge with Younes and his mother Shahira, both outsiders like her. Years later, when the situation comes to a head and the conflict with Raffiq's gang escalates, Amal flees to Kurdistan to look for her father. Raffiq's friend Younes is the reluctant centre of attention in their neighbourhood - thanks to his free-spirited mother Shahira, who breaks all the rules. Raffiq thinks about Shahira all the time, at once fascinated and repulsed by her. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Younes plans to leave. When Raffiq's girlfriend Amal also wants to move away, Raffiq's world begins to break apart. In her kaleidoscopic novel, Karosh Taha expands our ideas of class, race and gender as she loops two stories around an invisible lynchpin: a woman who defies all expectations, a blank canvas for projections from all those around her. Deftly translated by Grashina Gabelmann, the book can be explored from either end, creating two very different narratives. "This is the tight, urgent style of an author who genuinely has something to say." Stefanie Roenneke, Neues Deutschland

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