Books like Billiards at Half-Past Nine
On the day of his eightieth birthday in 1958, the architect Heinrich Faehmel and his son and grandson, three generations of a Cologne family, look back on fifty years of Germany.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Group Portrait with Lady
A researcher pieces together, from interviews with everyone who knew her, the life of Leni Pfeiffer, a Cologne woman who fell in love with a Soviet prisoner of war during the Second World War.
The Reader
In a West German city in the late 1950s, Michael Berg, fifteen, begins an affair with Hanna, a tram conductor more than twice his age, who one day disappears. Years later, as a law student, he sees her again, on trial.
Dog Years
The friendship of Walter Matern and Eddi Amsel, two boys from a village near Danzig, from the 1920s through the Nazi years and after, told by three narrators and shadowed by a line of black dogs.
The Train Was on Time
In 1943 Andreas, a young German soldier on a troop train heading back to the Eastern Front, is certain he will die within days, and counts down the time.
The Family Moskat
The wealthy Moskat family of Warsaw and its old patriarch Meshulam, from the turn of the century to the German bombardment of 1939.
Visitation
A summer house on a lake in Brandenburg, built in the 1930s on land bought from a Jewish family, passes through the hands of a century of occupants, through war, East Germany and reunification.
Crabwalk
A journalist born on the night the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed in 1945 is pushed by his mother to write its story, and finds his teenage son is already obsessed with it online.
Buckeye
In the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, on the day Germany surrenders in 1945, Margaret Salt, whose husband is away in the Navy, impulsively kisses Cal Jenkins in the hardware store, and that kiss shapes two families for decades.
Buddenbrooks
Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family from their commercial height through their slow bourgeois rot, in the novel that made the 25-year-old Mann.
An Artist of the Floating World
In the years after World War II, a once-celebrated Japanese painter tries to arrange his daughter's marriage while slowly facing the propaganda he made for the imperial cause.
Tonio Kröger
Tonio Kröger, son of a north German merchant and a dark-haired southern mother, grows up envying his town's ordinary, golden-haired boys and girls, and becomes a writer who belongs neither among artists nor among them.
Rosshalde
On the estate of Rosshalde, the celebrated painter Johann Veraguth lives estranged from his wife, his one joy their small son Pierre, as a friend urges him to leave for India.