At the end of the 1980s, a writer on a book tour, who very much resembles Grass, passes through East Germany and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor's models to dinner--and they come, not as ghosts, but as they were when alive in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed beauty Uta von Naumburg declares she has to go to work: a living statue.

As he continues touring around Europe, the writer looks for Uta and her donation basket outside every cathedral he passes. At last, in Frankfurt, he sees her in front of Deutsche Bank and the two have a meeting with staggering consequences. As Grass said, on paper everything is possible, and in this tale he gleefully erases the line between life and death, present and past.

Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now, but no book since The Tin Drum has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.
Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering.
Scuttling backward to move forward, Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.

Winner of the Nobel Prize

The second narrator, Harry Liebenau, tells part two, Love Letters, addressed to his cousin Tulla. From the vantage point of Danzig, he takes the reader into the prewar years and beyond. Amsel, a gifted and precocious creator of scarecrows made in the image of man, starts to build lifelike, mechanically marching SA-men, and it is Matern, his blood brother, himself an SA-man, who calls him sheeny and knocks out his teeth. The Dog Years are now in full swing; they lead right into the war, up to the moment when Prinz finally deserts his master, because even a dog can have enough.

The threads of the first two narrators axe taken up by Waltern Matern in the Materniads. Matern records the progress of his tour of revenge through postwar Germany. Accompanied by Prinz, he searches for the perpetrators of Nazi misdeeds and his lost blood brother, Amsel. Matern is innocent, an antifascist; it is the others who are guilty, even if the rising tide of prosperity seems to wash all of them clean. Fitfully administering a highly original -- if for him somewhat debilitating -- revenge, Matern ends up as a visitor in Herr Brauxel's mine, to find it peopled by an underground host of mechanical scarecrows in riotous preparation for their release aboveground.

This is the firstmajor novel that followed Grass's celebrated Tin Drum, exhibiting all the brilliance, inventiveness, and narrative daring of its predecessor. Beginning in the nineteen twenties and ending in the fifties, it is a splendid evocation of an apocalyptic period and its startling aftermath.

A female rat engages the narrator in a series of dialogues--convincingly demonstrating to him that the rats will inherit a devastated earth. Dreams alternate with reality in this story within a story within a story. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Two old men roam through Berlin observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Theo Wuttke, a former East German functionary, is a keen observer and a gifted speaker. Ludwig Hoftaller is a mid-level spy whose loyalties shift with each new regime. Together, both men see what the future is bringing as they try to save what they can from the past and understand the meaning of being German.

A complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's reunification will mean-for Germans, for Europe, and for the world-Too Far Afield is a masterwork from one of Europe's greatest writers. Written with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition, and political acerbity for which Grass is celebrated, it is a deeply human story laced with pain and humor in equal measure.

In this inspired and daring work of fiction, G nter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, and especially of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, happy, loving, accusatory--they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, a photographer and family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more than simple replication. They reveal a truth beyond ordinary life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: Was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? An audacious literary experiment, The Box is Grass at his best.