Why Join?

  • Add New Books

  • Write a Review

  • Backpack Reading Lists

  • Newsletter Updates

Join Now

Filter:

The Vagabond Mother

The Vagabond Mother
  • Author(s): Tracey Scott-Townsend
  • Location(s): Australia, Germany, Iceland, Spain
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): Present

All Maya Galen wanted was a happy family, stifling the inner urges she had to explore the wider world, for the sake of being there for her children. But parenting with her husband, Con, wasn’t always easy. Their eldest...

The Violinist’s Secret

The Violinist’s Secret
  • Author(s): M J Hollows
  • Location(s): Hamburg
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
  • Era(s): WW2

Charlotte Weber is against the Nazi regime and what it stands for, but as she attends Hamburg University, she struggles to make sense of the war she finds herself a part of. Practising her violin for the university orchestra...

The Wall Jumper

The Wall Jumper
  • Author(s): Peter Schneider
  • Location(s): Berlin
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1950s, 1960s

The Words I Never Wrote

The Words I Never Wrote
  • Author(s): Jane Thynne
  • Location(s): Berlin, New York City (NYC)
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
  • Era(s): Present Day, WW2

New York, present day: On a whim, Juno Lambert buys a 1931 Underwood typewriter that once belonged to celebrated journalist Cordelia Capel. Within its case she discovers an unfinished novel, igniting a transatlantic journey to fill the gaps in...

The Zookeeper’s War

The Zookeeper’s War
  • Author(s): Steven Conte
  • Location(s): Berlin
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): WW2

It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo’s director. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids...

They Divided the Sky

They Divided the Sky
  • Author(s): Christa Wolf
  • Location(s): Berlin
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1961

First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions...

Things That Disappear

Things That Disappear
  • Author(s): Jenny Erpenbeck
  • Location(s): Germany
  • Genre(s): Short Stories
  • Era(s): Later 20th Century / various

The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German parliament, is demolished. A grandmother’s laughter passes from life into memory. Furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old...

This House Is Mine

This House Is Mine
  • Author(s): Dörte Hansen
  • Location(s): Schleswig-Holstein
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): Modern

All her life Vera has felt like a stranger in the old and drafty half-timbered farmhouse she arrived at as a five-year-old refugee from East Prussia in 1945, and yet she can’t seem to let it go. Sixty years...

This must be the Place

This must be the Place
  • Author(s): Anna Winger
  • Location(s): Berlin
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 2000s

Tomorrow, Berlin

Tomorrow, Berlin
  • Author(s): Oscar Coop-Phane
  • Location(s): Berlin
  • Genre(s): Coming of Age, Fiction
  • Era(s): Contemporary

Berlin. A city where nightclubs stay open from Friday night till Monday morning. A city with an underbelly as dark and addictive as the 24-hour drugs, drinking, dancing and sex in filthy toilets that it serves up. Three young...

Would you like to add a book or a review or create a reading list? Join Today – It's FREE

Register Now