Berlin Verlag successes

Kleine Schritte, Louis Sachar

A brilliant companion volume to mega bestseller HOLES.

Armpit and X-Ray are living in Austin, Texas. It is three years since they left the confines of Camp Green Lake Detention Centre and Armpit is taking small steps to turn his life around. He is working for a landscape gardener because he is good at digging holes, he is going to school and he is enjoying his first proper romance, but is he going to be able to stay out of trouble when there is so much building up against him?

Miss Webster und Cherif, Patricia Duncker

Miss Webster and Cherif tells the oldest of stories — an unlikely friendship, the prejudices of a small, rural community, the arrival of a foreigner — but in a new, post 9/11, world. Patricia Duncker is one of Britain’s finest novelists and she is on top of her form. This is an entertaining, clever, provocative book, full of surprises, nuance and humour.

Der Teppichhändler, Meg Mullins

A sparkling debut novel about an unlikely romance between an Iranian immigrant and an American college student. Isolated and far from his native Iran, Ushman Khan has worked hard to build a wealthy, reliable clientele for his wares: exquisite hand-woven rugs from his home city of Tabriz.With perfect rectitude, he caters to clients like New York’s Upper East Side grand dame Mrs. Roberts, who plies him for stories about his exotic origins and culture to feed her own imagination. But like many immigrants, he’s living only half a life. He dreams of the day his beloved wife, Farak, will be able to join him in New York and complete his vision of the American dream. But when she tells him that she is leaving him for another man, Ushman is shattered. He begins to wander aimlessly through the terminals of JFK Airport, imagining a now-impossible reunion with Farak. Unexpectedly, he meets Stella, a Barnard College student who has just bade farewell to her parents en route for an Italian vacation. After Stella, isolated in her own way, finds herself at Ushman’s Manhattan store, they embark on an improbable and powerful romance. Together this American girl from the Deep South and the Iranian aesthete form a tender bond that awakens them both to the possibility of joy in a world full of tragedy.

Der Sportreporter, Richard Ford

My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter’ - one of the most famous lines in American literature opens this classic, inimitable tour de force.

Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses — his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, though he will emerge heroic with spirits soaring. This is a magnificent novel that propelled Richard Ford into the first rank of American writers.