The love german books Christmas List

Don't you love those magazine features that tell you what gifts to buy for girls, boys and grandparents? If you're anything like me, though, those lists will be a little short on recent German books for your taste.

So I've put together the ultimate seasonal book-buying guide for bombarding your loved ones with books translated out of German. I haven't read all of them, admittedly, but I'd still say it's a good bet they're pretty hot stuff. So gather those friends and family around you, stock up on the lebkuchen, light the candles on your Germanic tree, and rejoice - 'tis the season to be Teutonic.

And so, in no particular order, the recommendations.

For political crime fans:
Hans Werner Kettenbach / Anthea Bell, David’s Revenge

For bad girls:
Charlotte Roche / Tim Mohr, Wetlands

For the slightly silly:
Walter Moers / John Brownjohn, The Alchemaster’s Apprentice

For teenage girls:
Beate Teresa Hanika / Katy Derbyshire, Learning to Scream

For imaginative kids:
Reinhardt Jung / Anthea Bell, Bambert’s Book of Missing Stories

For the long-sighted:
Robert Walser / Susan Bernofsky, The Microscripts

For people you really like:
Jenny Erpenbeck / Susan Bernofsky, Visitation

For people who really love Rome:
Friedrich Christian Delius / Jamie Bulloch, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman

For map freaks:
Judith Schalansky / Christine Lo, Atlas of Remote Islands

For historically interested safer sex lovers:
Götz Aly, Michael Sontheimer / Shelley Frisch, Fromms

For vodka-drinkers:
Alina Bronsky / Tim Mohr, Broken Glass Park

For quiet rebels:
Hans Fallada / Michael Hofmann, Alone in Berlin

For people who don’t really like getting presents:
Thomas Bernhard / Carol Janeway, My Prizes: an accounting

For star-crossed lovers:
Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann / Wieland Hoban, Correspondence

For Berlin fans:
Lyn Marven (ed.), Berlin Tales

For gullible romantics:
Siegfried Lenz / Anthea Bell, A Minute’s Silence

For delinquent physicists:
Juli Zeh / Christine Lo, Dark Matter

For closet Orientalists:
Rafik Schami / Anthea Bell, The Calligrapher’s Secret

For celebrities:
Daniel Kehlmann / Carol Brown Janeway, Fame

For crime fans with a sense of humour:
Jakob Arjouni / Anthea Bell, Kismet

For multiple fathers:
Günter Grass / Krishna Winston, The Box

For lovers of beautiful prose and/or mining towns:
Ralf Rothmann / Wieland Hoban, Young Light

For dead people:
David Safier / John Brownjohn, Bad Karma

For aged hippies:
Berhard Schlink / Shaun Whiteside, The Weekend

For prolific readers in the UK:
Peirene subscription

For prolific readers in the USA:
Open Letter subscription

I thought about linking to Amazon, but then I decided to let you choose where to buy them. So the links are to publishers' websites in the UK or the US, just to give you an idea of the books. Happy shopping!