Books like Europe Central
Linked stories of Germany and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, of artists, officers and informers, from the composer Shostakovich to the SS officer Kurt Gerstein.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Europe Central
Stones from the River
Trudi Montag, born with dwarfism in the small German town of Burgdorf in 1915, grows up minding her father's lending library and collecting her neighbours' secrets, as the town moves through war, Nazi rule and what followed.
Life and Fate
A Soviet physicist and his extended family move through Stalingrad, a German camp, the Lubyanka, and the Soviet state in a book Grossman wrote knowing it would be suppressed.
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.
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
Seven linked stories of revolutionaries swallowed by the Soviet purges and by the revolution they served, told as if from the archives.
Schindler's Ark
The true story of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi industrialist who saved over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories.
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.
In the First Circle
Over three days in December 1949, imprisoned scientists in a special prison outside Moscow work on secret projects for Stalin's police while a diplomat makes a dangerous phone call.
Herscht 07769
Florian Herscht, a gentle giant in a small town in Thuringia, writes letter after letter to Angela Merkel warning her of the end of the universe, while the neo-Nazis around him have other plans.
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.
A Small Death in Lisbon
In Lisbon in the 1990s Inspector Zé Coelho investigates the murder of a teenage girl, while in 1941 Klaus Felsen, a German industrialist pressed into the SS, is sent to Portugal to secure the wolfram the Reich needs for its war.
Doctor Faustus
A German biographer writes during the Reich's collapse about his friend, a composer who contracted for twenty-four years of genius in a Leipzig brothel.
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.