Empfehlungen aus English stories!

I've landed again. Wow, that was an exciting reading trip to America and outer space! Now it's time to take a deep breath! And find the words to describe this great book.

Taylor Jenkins Reid is no longer an unknown planet in this country. And yet this book has shown me once again what an outstanding author the American is. Like many other novels, “The Seven Men of Evelyn Hugo” is a global bestseller. But “Atmosphere,” as its promising cover suggests, is extremely cool, absolutely gripping, and a stand-alone.

When Joan learns from her sister that NASA wants to train women to be astronauts again, the astronomer and physicist pricks up her ears. There had been a project before, but it was scrapped. Now, however, the women are returning. And Joan becomes one of them. Together with Lydia, Donna, and Vanessa. Group 9 includes others, including Griff. The training brings the people together. Warmth flows through my veins, but my breath catches when I suddenly experience a space mission in which complications arise – four years later in the book. Vanessa is the only one who is not injured in an explosion. Now every second counts! Joan is sitting on Earth in mission control—the center that is in contact with the space shuttle crew, coordinating everything and being pushed to its limits.

Taylor Jenkins Reid switches between the present and the path that led to it. I follow Joan's journey, which is remarkable. Not only in how she cares for her little niece Frances. Because there is also Vanessa, who triggers something in her that she had never experienced before. And then it happens. But love between two women at NASA in the 1980s is allowed to exist, of course...

Jenkins Reid proceeds very sensitively, without falling into kitsch. The relationships between the characters are so realistic that I feel like I have real friends by my side. Equally remarkable are Reid's thoughts on the universe and the stuff we are made of. As she so beautifully writes: “When you look up at the night sky, you see parts of what once was and what you may one day be.”

“Atmosphere” is so many things in one: a love story, a family history, a shimmering flight to the stars, a call to follow your dreams and your heart, and to fight for what you love and what is important to you, without compromise.

 

I am caught in the spider's web. That's how I felt at first in “In Their House.” Quite uncomfortable, because Isabel is an unpleasant woman. She lives alone and secluded in the family home after her mother's death. Only her brothers, Hendrik and Louis, and an admirer draw her outside. During a meal with her brothers, she meets Louis' new girlfriend: Eva.

Shortly afterwards, Louis turns up at Isabel's with Eva. He has taken on an important job at short notice and is reluctant to leave his girlfriend alone in his shared flat with his roommate. After a brief interlude, Eva is allowed to stay with Isabel.

Can this work out? The two are like cats and dogs. What else is bothering Isabel: things keep disappearing. Here a spoon, there a bowl, a knife. She suspects her housekeeper Neelke and watches her with eagle eyes. But Eva is also a monster to her. Then something happens that turns both their lives upside down. Mine too. The spider has me firmly in its clutches.

In the end, I took both women into my heart, breathless and completely thrilled by what the Dutch author has cleverly woven into the story.

The author was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize with her debut—so well deserved. I am particularly pleased that it was published by Gutkind Verlag. They fit together as well as our two characters. What do you mean? Yes, you missed something. You'll find the answer between the pages.

It doesn't take Benjamin Wood long to get me hooked. I bite into the book immediately. It's more my eyes that get stuck in it. The further I immerse myself in the story, the warmer I feel, even though it's cold the whole time. This is due to the two main characters: Edgar and Thomas.

At first, I see Thomas at work. The 20-year-old is a crab fisherman and carries on his grandfather's legacy. Every day he takes his horse and cart into the mudflats, collecting crabs at low tide. There used to be more men, now he is the only one. It's wet, mostly dripping or fog hanging over the landscape. It was precisely this setting that led the American director Edgar Acheson to Thomas' mother. The two of them are waiting for Thomas at home after work.

There, Edgar tells him that he is offering him a job: He could give him a hand with the filming. Edgar wants to film a well-known novel that Thomas, a frequent reader, has never heard of. Thomas becomes increasingly fond of the man and 100 pounds is a lot of money. After all, it is the 1960s. Thomas only gets two pounds and four shillings for his daily catch from his customer.

So they become business partners and relatively fast friends. Their conversations are sometimes profound, spiced with charm and a pleasant warmth of heart. For the first time, Thomas looks beyond his small world in Longferry and senses what could be possible. He confides his big secret to Edgar: Thomas has been playing the guitar for a long time. He should go out and show everyone. But Thomas, in his modesty, refuses. Then Edgar suddenly disappears into the fog and strange things pull the rug from under our feet...

Wow, what a read! It lives from wonderful atmospheric descriptions of nature as well as from the lovable characters and the unexpected twists that quietly creep into the story and blew me away in the end. “The Crab Fisherman” is a book with a quiet power that creates a lingering echo and won over the Booker Prize jury. That's why the title is currently on the longlist.

Admittedly, before reading her autobiography, I only knew a handful of songs by Neneh Cherry, and those were the ones that became small and big hits: Woman, 7 Seconds, Buffalo Stance, and Manchild. I also knew that her dad is named Don Cherry,her brother is Eagle Eye Cherry and who both are musicians like their daughter and sister. 'A Thousand Threads' has added quite a bit of knowledge: that she was once part of 'The Slits', that Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest once offered her the chance to collaborate on their first album (which she regrets declining to this day), and above all, how warm-hearted and wise the singer and rapper is. 
Neneh Cherry tells her story directly, unflinchingly, and honestly from her life in the artistic milieu, about successes, mistakes, her favorite companions, painful losses, and places that provide solace.

'A Thousand Threads' is incredibly moving and wonderfully entertaining at the same time. For a few days now, the book has been on the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, and I think that's very justified.
Well done!

It’s the 1960s, on a hot day, in Maine. Siblings Joe and Ruthie are sitting on their favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fileds, where their Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia pick fruit, like every year. Six-year-old Joe leaves his little sister for a short while – only to find her gone on his return. Ruthie’s vanishing will forever hunt him. Yet he believes, without a doubt, that she is out there, somewhere.

In a nice suburb nearby, Norma is growing up as the only and deeply loved child of troubled parents. Recurring dreams in which she finds herself in strange yet familiar looking places with people who seem to be her siblings hunt her. Her mother keeps saying: only bad dreams. Are they though?

The Berry Pickers is a deeply moving story about loss, guilt, family and unwavering love. Keep your tissue box nearby!!

The Oppenheimers are a Jewish-American success story. You live in a big house in Brooklyn, and of course you spend the summer on Martha's Vineyard.
Salo runs the long-established and enormously successful family business, the investment company Württemberg Holding, while his wife Johanna takes care of all the family's concerns.
Both leave his sphere of life to the other, a fact that seems right to Salo, who is marked early by tragedy, especially because his wife lets him live out his passion for art and collecting, including specially rented storage rooms for the accumulated pictures and objects.

However, the offspring made possible by a lengthy fertility treatment and longed for by Johanna turns out to be a special challenge: the triplets Harrison, Sally and Lewyn go their own ways from childhood - and avoid each other as much as possible.
For Johanna, who is concerned about family cohesion, this is a catastrophe - but the true catastrophic events will present the family with completely different challenges....

The Latecomer" by Jean Hanff Korelitz, translated by Sabine Lehmann, is an immensely refreshing and rousing novel, which is not by chance reminiscent of the great Edith Wharton. In equal parts "old-fashioned and modern, satirical and wise" ( according to the New York Times ), the author tells in her bulging family and social history of social and political upheavals, of the appropriation of art and literature, rivalries and conflicts and so on...
This novel has 492 pages, which completely captivated me and made me forget everything around me.
The Oppenheimers are not easy protagonists, not always likeable - but also immensely fascinating.

If you like literary novels spanning great American generations and fates, this book is the right choice!

Do you want to read stirring books in our troubled times? Rather less. "The Song of the Prophet" is an important book that should still be opened. What the Booker Prize winner tells is extremely oppressive, and above all how he portrays the story: dark, unsettling, captivating, moving and exciting until the last page. Literature may be distracting, but it should also stimulate discourse and exchange. Speaking of impetus: I owe the book to my dear colleague Sarah O'Connor. She read the original for a long time before me and has been campaigning for it since last winter.

"Prophet Song" is a dystopia, far away and yet very close to us. Would we have thought a year ago that the right-wing populists in this country and in the EU would become so strong?

I read my way through this story with bated breath, which is difficult to bear. From the first sentence on, the Irish author creates an oppressive atmosphere that you can't escape. Breathless are the dense sentences that I run after just as much as Eilish - a lioness who tries to live on between powerlessness and helplessness, to be there for her family. Because Eilish has three other children for whom she wants and needs to be there. Always at her side: the hope that everything will be fine in the end.

"Prophet Song" shakes you to the core. And yet you should read the book. The Booker Prize winner shows in a frightening way what literature can achieve.

William Waters' start in life is not easy: shortly after his birth, his older sister dies unexpectedly of pneumonia, which he thought he had survived. The parents fall into a kind of shock, continue to live their lives, but can give William neither affection nor affection. Only the love of basketball keeps him going in the truest sense of the word.
When he meets Julia Padavano at college, everything seems to be taking a turn for the better. The attractive woman falls in love with him, the marriage is a done deal, as Julia plans everything else in detail. The most important thing for William, however, is the security he experiences from Julia, her three sisters and his future in-laws.
And then, one day, everything turns out very differently and will change the lives of everyone involved forever...

Barack Obama counts this novel among his favorite books, the "New York Times Book Review" was also full of praise. I understand this very much, as this is a novel that captivates you from the very first lines, that has protagonists that you want as friends and acquaintances and whose lives make you happy despite all the tragedy. But the biggest compliment is probably that you don't want to finish this novel even after 520 pages.
And when the title is pronounced by a character towards the end, not a dry eye remains.

In Ned Beaumen’s fifth novel our present is the novel’s pre-dystopian past.
The novel’s present is a super heated, algorithm driven near future, in which we follow two strangers brought together for a kind of hunt . The target/ victim is the Venomous Lumpsucker, the most intelligent fish on earth – yet. The species is nearly extinct, only a few survivours hide on the Baltoscandian sea bottom. Swiss biologist Karin Resaint is hired by an Indian mining company to assess the fish’s intelligence while her undesired partner in crime, Mark Halyard, a British „environmental impact coordinator“ hopes for her to downgrade the fish – otherwise he’ll lose a lot of money.

This darkly funny, elaborate and impactful zoological thriller is definitely THE book for our age of Extinction Rebellion!

On the lookout for a holiday read? Whether you intend to spend it on your couch, balcony, your allotment or on an island: Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast should be your choice! Set in picturesque Cornwall in 1947 we are faced with the sudden death of several people, victims of an avalanche – so it seems. Yet how sure can we be that there was no human involvement after all? Here’s the conclusion: read the book! (It just came out in German!)

A huge amount of children love dinosaurs and so did I. 30 years later I'm still crazy in love with them and one day (another 30 years later when I am a pensioner) I will hopefully study paleontology. Which leads me to a question: What happens to all that dinosaur loving kids when they are grown-ups? Do they simply forget about Dinosaurs or even think these huge animals are too silly? If you are like me and think dinosaurs (and platypus and anteaters but that`s another topic) are the coolest, you might be (for sure!) interested in this extraordinary book „Dinosaurs are collectible" which contains a lot of known and unknown facts und wonderful pictures. And the most important chapter is a guide on how to start your own precious collection. I would give a lot for an own little gathering, but space might be a problem.