In this quiet novel, Katja Oskamp shines a loving light on Marzahn, a neglected prefab district in East Berlin once hailed as a socialist ideal. Now working as a podiatrist, the narrator shares the tender, funny, and heartbreaking stories of her elderly patients. Far from the trendy cafés and museums, this is Berlin’s overlooked human side – full of dignity, memory, and resilience.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 2019
  • Original title: Marzahn, mon Amour
  • 224 pages
  • Notable: Winner of the Dublin Literary Award.

Read the full book page: Marzahn, Mon Amour

Set in the heart of today’s Berlin, this deeply moving novel follows a retired classics professor who becomes involved in the lives of African refugees stranded in the city’s administrative limbo. From the government offices around Alexanderplatz to the makeshift shelters in Tempelhof, the novel traces a powerful journey through Berlin’s landscape of migration, identity, and human rights challenges.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 2017
  • Original title: Gehen, ging, gegangen
  • 320 pages.
  • Notable: The author, Jenny Erpenbeck, won many literary awards, including the Thomas Mann Prize, the Hans Fallada Prize, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the European Literature Prize, and the International Booker Prize.

Read the full book page: Go Went Gone

On the banks of Groß Glienicker See, just outside Berlin, stands a house that quietly witnessed the sweep of recent German history. From its Jewish owners forced to flee the Nazis to the city’s Cold War division by the Berlin Wall, this real-life narrative of one home becomes a haunting mirror of Berlin’s 20th-century history. A compelling personal and political portrait of the city through the lens of a lakeside holiday house.

• • Setting: Berlin (at Groß Glienicker See).
  • Year of publication: 2016
  • Original title: The House by the Lake
  • 464 pages

Read the full book page: The House by the Lake

This autobiographical account offers a rare view into Berlin under Nazi rule from the perspective of a principled Catholic family. Living in Berlin’s Karlshorst-Lichtenberg quarter, Joachim Fest’s family resists the Nazi regime while enduring its pressures and propaganda. The book paints a vivid image of daily life in Berlin during one of its darkest eras, anchored in the personal integrity that quietly defied conformity.

• • Setting: Primarily Berlin
  • Year of publication: 2006
  • Original title: Ich nicht: Erinnerungen an eine Kindheit und Jugend
  • 458 pages

Read the full book page: Not I, Memoirs of a German Childhood

Set in the grey, paranoid world of East Berlin under Stasi rule, I follows a conflicted Communist informer embedded in the city’s underground literary scene. With moody, fragmented prose, Hilbig captures the psychological toll of life in a surveillance state. This is Berlin stripped of glamour – its basements and smoky bars haunted by suspicion, guilt, and lost identity.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1993
  • Original title: Ich
  • 384 pages
  • Notable: The author, Wolfgang Hilbig, received many literary awards, including the Georg Büchner Prize, the Fontane Prize, and the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

Read the full book page: I

Set in bomb-scarred 1950s Berlin, this Cold War thriller unfolds partly beneath the city streets, in secret Allied tunnels under the Soviet sector. As British technician Leonard Marnham becomes entangled in covert operations and a passionate affair with a local woman, Berlin becomes a labyrinth of secrets, boundaries, and betrayals. A tense, intelligent novel that captures the divided city’s claustrophobic intensity.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1990
  • Original title: The Innocent
  • 231 pages
  • Notable: The author, Ian McEwan, won several literary awards, including the Booker Prize.

Read the full book page: The Innocent

Years before the Berlin Wall fell, Peter Schneider chronicled its psychological impact on Berliners who crossed, jumped, or stared across it. In this haunting portrait of the divided city, Berlin’s cafés, U-Bahn platforms, and parks become surreal spaces where identity fractures and reality feels absurd. A thoughtful masterpiece of Cold War literature.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1982
  • Original title: Der Mauerspringer
  • 128 pages

Read the full book page: The Wall Jumper

This iconic Cold War spy thriller opens and ends at Checkpoint Charlie, where British agent Alec Leamas embarks on a dangerous undercover mission into East Berlin. Le Carré’s Berlin is shadowy and morally ambiguous – a city where ideologies blur and lives unravel. The setting is no mere backdrop: it’s a metaphor for betrayal, division, and the human cost of espionage.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1963
  • Original title: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
  • 256 pages
  • Notable: Winner of the Dagger of Daggers by the British Crime Writers’ Association, the Edgar Award for best mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America, and the Somerset Maugham Award.

Read the full book page: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Spanning 70 years of German history, Effingers follows the intertwined lives of several prominent Jewish-German families in Berlin from 1878 to 1948. As Germany shifts from empire to republic to dictatorship, Berlin evolves with it – from a city of salons and grand boulevards to one scarred by anti-Semitism and irreparable loss. A richly layered, panoramic family saga capturing Berlin’s changing fortunes and forgotten voices.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1951
  • Original title: Effingers
  • 704 pages

Read the full book page: Effingers

Based on a true story, this gripping novel unfolds in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, where an ordinary couple silently defy the Nazi regime by scattering protest postcards. Fallada’s Berlin is one of fear and whisper networks, but also of stubborn resistance. In this tense moral drama, the city’s tenements and stairwells become sites of courage and looming danger.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1947
  • Original title: Jeder stirbt für sich allein
  • 649 pages

Read the full book page: Every Man dies Alone (Alone in Berlin)

As Germany transforms under the Nazis, so too does actor Hendrik Höfgen, who trades conscience for career. Set against the decadent and then chilling backdrop of the theatrical world of Berlin and Hamburg, Mephisto charts a moral descent through dressing rooms and propaganda stages. It’s a blistering portrait of Germany’s cultural elite seduced by power – and complicit in evil.

• • Setting: Hamburg; Berlin; Paris
  • Year of publication: 1936
  • Original title: Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere
  • 272 pages

Read the full book page: Mephisto

Step into early 1930s Berlin, where cabaret lights flicker over a city torn between democracy, fascism, and communism. Through the eyes of the mysterious Mr. Norris, Isherwood unveils the city’s underbelly – its smoky cafés, dodgy boarding houses, and shadowy political intrigue. Both grim and glamorous, this Berlin teeters on the brink of catastrophe, captured in sharp, ironic prose by one of its most iconic foreign chroniclers.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1935
  • Original title: Mr. Norris Changes Trains
  • 280 pages

Read the full book page: Mr. Norris Changes Trains (The Berlin Stories)

Set in Berlin as the Nazi tide begins to swell, The Oppermanns follows a cultured Jewish family as their beloved city turns against them. Their elegant Berlin homes and thriving businesses gradually give way to fear, surveillance, and exile. Written on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel offers a prophetic and poignant snapshot of Berlin in the early 1930s.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1934
  • Original title: Die Geschwister Oppermann
  • 416 pages

Read the full book page: The Oppermanns

This Weimar-era classic follows a young couple struggling to survive in depression-era Berlin, bouncing between rented rooms, meagre jobs, and mounting anxieties. With sharp observation and deep compassion, Fallada paints a picture of a Berlin where love persists even as politics darken and poverty grows.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1932
  • Original title: Kleiner Mann, was nun?
  • 340 pages

Read the full book page: Little Man, What Now

In this landmark modernist novel, Berlin is not just a setting – it’s the central character. Following ex-convict Franz Biberkopf through the city’s streets, pubs, and tenements, Döblin creates a cinematic collage of 1920s Berlin in all its noise, chaos, and danger. Gritty, experimental, and utterly immersive, it’s a fever dream of a metropolis in moral and political freefall.

• • Setting: Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1929
  • Original title: Berlin Alexanderplatz
  • 480 pages
  • Notable: The author, Alfred Döblin, was awarded the Fontane Prize.

Read the full book page: Berlin Alexanderplatz

In the volatile Berlin of the early 1920s, ex-soldier Theodor Lohse becomes entangled in violent right-wing conspiracies. Roth’s novella vividly portrays the city’s atmosphere of betrayal, anti-Semitism, and clandestine plots. From smoke-filled backrooms to shadowy alleys, Berlin emerges as a breeding ground for extremism – an ominous web of paranoia that hints at what is to come.

• • Setting: Various settings in Germany, primarily in and around Berlin
  • Year of publication: 1923
  • Original title: Das Spinnennetz
  • 112 pages

Read the full book page: The Spider’s Web