Born in Romania between the wars, raised in poverty and washed up in Austria by the turmoil of war, Mrs Berta’s life was one of humiliation, pain and misery. Now in an old people’s home, she describes these violent events to the narrator. He in turn lives in the Pension Adler, with various tattooed, one-armed guests, as well as kindly Swedish women. In the home, with its shifty inmates and carers, he begins to feel comfortable, and takes detailed notes of Mrs Berta’s story. Max Blaeulich’s novel illuminates every shade of despair there is. Yet existential loneliness has seldom been described with such assured language and unsparing precision since Kafka.

Hitler is in power, but not yet in his homeland. There, people are waiting to “come home” to the empire, some full of hope, some full of fear. Stackler is nobody who likes to wait, and above all he doesn’t know fear. The “illegal” Nazi gets prepared for his time of glory: Stackler, in the position of the head of the institute for racial research, wants to create the new man, wants to care for pure blood at university, to wipe out. The fact that “Miss March”, who doesn’t only assist him in scientific concerns, makes him a father of an illegitimate child is thereby very inconvenient. But what for does somebody like Stackler know the value of life... “May I introduce myself, Professor Stackler, physiologist.” A person who introduces himself in such a dynamic and snappy way knows before all the others what’s happening, and he goose-steps ahead: up the job ladder, from one empire to the next, from one republic to the next and always sticking at nothing. In the heart of the heart of the darkness: Max Blaeulich completes his trilogy about the wild Europe – an opus that can’t be compared to anything in German literature: pitiless, keen, radical.

Carried off to Europe as a slave, a souvenir of an Africa expedition Gatterbauertwo is second footman to his master Alois Gatterbauer and looking for his home Uganda. After a time of meandering and after many detours he ends up in Hungary, goes to the dogs, and at the home of Count Pallavicini he is to be turned into a cultivated, converted catholic butler. He learns quickly: manners, waiting, German – but most of all he learns to hate. When heir apparent Franz Ferdinand is killed in Serbia and World War I breaks loose he is well prepared for his new role: He goes to war – for a strange emperor, a strange god, and a country that is not his. How can you survive Europe, the wild continent, the permanent war in the heart of darkness? And what does humanity mean, when man is nothing more than a cue ball of foreign powers – slave, soldier, object to look on, object of lust, a commodity? Based on meticulously researched historic material Max Blaeulich draws the picture of a society degenerated to the core: Europe, a culture where moral values have been perverted by racist arrogance and greed; Europe, gloriously stumbling across dead bodies from one catastrophe into the next. The quote from Dostoevsky tunes in for a grotesque pitch. Blaeulich is a master of this field, and he is in good company: Gogol, Canetti, Gombrowicz, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Sergio Pitol, just to name a few. The genre of the grotesque itself is a blossom of baroque art. Blaeulich is a baroque author not only because of his characterisations, but also because of his roaming, straying, slope-searching way of storytelling. LEOPOLD FÖDERMAIER, NZZ

Apprentice Georg Rohrs isn't the sharpest tool in the box. But he has a dream: he wants to be the elevator boy in a seaside hotel, wants to escape on the night train with his first love Marlies and escape the confinement of his life at home. When Georg happens upon a dead body and accidentally steals his boss's suitcase full of dirty cash, his life begins to unravel: within a single weekend Georg loses his job, his apartment, his parents, his friends, his money, his love and maybe a piece of his sanity – and yet, at the end of this neck-breaking tour-de-force, an unknown sense of freedom awaits him... Martin Lechner's fast-paced debut novel is a whirlwind adventure where provincial comedy meets literary genius. Nominated for the German Book Prize 2014 (Longlist)

Karin lives with her boyfriend Alexander in a house by the woods. Her foster-sister Lisa once lived there too, along with her parents August and Inge, sister Margarethe and brother Peter. Back then Karin and Lisa were happy; they grew as fast as the brambles, dived to the bottom of the lake hand in hand, and hid in the tiny caves formed by tree roots. Then something happened; August died and the foster child was banished. Years later Karin fetches Lisa back, and the two women become entangled in a game as destructive as it is seductive, sucked into a whirlpool of addiction, attraction and repulsion which holds us enthralled till the final page.