Denis Scheck comments on the bestseller list

10.) Carsten Henn: The book walker (Pendo, 224 p., 14 €)

Seldom read a horror prose that is so completely out of date as this story about a bookseller grandpa who has the right book for every tormented soul. A novel like a fossil from the Adenauer era brought to life with the resources of “Jurassic Park”.

9.) Leïla Slimani: The country of others (from the French by Amelie Thoma. Luchterhand, 384 p., 22 €).

Leïla Slimani talks about Mathilde from Alsace and Amine from Moroccan, also conventionally, but less brusquely and, above all, never stereotypically. Both got to know and love each other in World War II, now everyday life between Islamic archaic and modernity is catching up with them on the inherited farm in Morocco. Unsurprisingly, but acceptable.

8.) Susanne Abel: Stay Away From Gretchen (dtv, 528 Seiten, 20 €.)

For the third time a conventionally told story, but one that convinces through empathy and sharpness of observation. The demand “Stay away from Gretchen” was imposed on US occupation soldiers as a fraternization ban after the end of World War II. Susanne Abel tells of a German news anchor, his mother Greta, who is threatened with dementia – and the consequences of her love for the black tank soldier Robert Cooper.

7.) Benedict Wells: Hard Land (Diogenes, 352 pages, € 24.)

Benedict Wells has always written well, but this time he goes a step further. The magic of his coming-of-age story is simply irresistible: A 16-year-old outsider experiences friendship, love and real pain for the first time in the American provinces, sometimes exulting, sometimes saddened to death. “Euphancholia” is the neologism that most aptly describes the mood of this novel.

6.) Ewald Arenz: The great summer (DuMont, 320 pages, € 20.)

Ewald Arenz also tells of first love and the molting of puberty in “The Great Summer”, but in his novel goes back a few years further than Benedict Wells and remains in the Federal Republic. Because he succeeds in dialogue sentences like: “In any case, it only exists in love, that you torment yourself to despair and are happy at the same time”, this is an entertaining and wise book.

5.) Judith Hermann: At home (S. Fischer, 192 pages, 21 €)

Judith Hermann’s “Daheim” is a complex novel, and it is actually not fair to reduce it to a love story. But: “At home” is the strongest love story I’ve read in a long time. In the center: a woman who was married, her daughter is now an adult, and this woman has just separated from her husband and moved from Berlin to the seaside, where her brother runs a pub.

There she starts an affair with a pig farmer, of all places. Can you imagine anything more unattractive than a man like that who keeps a thousand pigs for torture? And yet Hermann manages to unfold this love story in an atmospherically dense, exciting and ambiguous way. In her novel, Judith Herrmann tells of missed opportunities, of untrodden paths. About climate change and the desert in our hearts.

4.) Helga Schubert: From getting up (dtv, 224 pages, € 22.)

How do you keep a touch of dignity in a “dwarf state” called the GDR that walled up its subjects? Helga Schubert tells about the power of anger, the danger of pathos and the power of truth in this special volume of stories. And all of us, who work our way through our fathers or mothers, can amuse ourselves at how strongly in the book of an over 80-year-old author her mother is, who died at the age of 101.

3.) Donna Leon: Fleeting desire (German by Werner Schmitz, Diogenes, 320 pages, € 24.)

Few authors write as relaxed as Donna Leon does today. Perhaps it is because Commissario Brunetti’s 30th case – it is about people smuggling and two young tourists who are injured during a night excursion to the lagoon – on the one hand disarmed in its usual harmlessness, on the other hand impressed by the nonchalance with which Leon is completely raises major issues: Where does responsibility end? What is guilt How can one make atonement?

2.) July toe: About people (Luchterhand, 416 pages, € 22.)

An enlightened Berlin recruiter, a cyclist and Greens voter anyway, gets to know the suspended precariat in Brandenburg in the form of her helpful neighbor, a self-declared “village Nazi”. And with that begins the great pleasure of this novel, which focuses sharply on the lies of the Federal Republic of Germany. The reception of this novel seems to me to be very much determined by ideological blinkers. An attempt to come to an agreement: haven’t laughed like that for a long time?

1.) Lucinda Riley: The missing sister (German by Karin Dufner, Sonja Hauser, Sibylle Schmidt and Ursula Wulfskamp. Goldmann. 829 p., 22 €.)

The author (of this trash saga) of this book series died a few weeks ago. (Unfortunately) Fortunately, she was able to complete her (miserably stupid) original novel cycle about seven sisters who are trying to clarify their origins after the death of their adoptive father. (Underground junk, stupid, banal, reactionary – every word about this literary impertinence would be a waste.) As is well known, only good things about the dead.