Sinking Stars

  • An alpine apocalypse imbued with an alarming amount of the present
  • A fiery plea for literary freedom
  • English sample translation by Shaun Whiteside available 

A lonely house in the mountains and a natural disaster that causes a Swiss canton to suddenly renounce the present: Sinking Stars is a  soaringly inscrutable novel in which an apparent idyll becomes a threat and which takes us deep into the world of literature itself.

Thomas Hettche writes about traveling to Switzerland in the wake of his parents’ death to sell his childhood vacation home. Yet what begins realistically soon turns into a dystopian fairy tale in which nothing is what it seems. A landslide has turned the Rhone Valley into a huge lake leading to a poitical regression into archaic conditions. 

Hettche brilliantly depicts alpine nature and its inhabitants’ forgotten ways, combining ancient myths and sagas with an often downright Kafkaesque scenario. All of this assumes new meaning in our present roiled by identity issues and environmental destruction. At its core, however, this great storyteller’s musical prose revolves around the questions of what comfort storytelling can provide and what we should defend in the turmoil of our times.

Contact Foreign Rights
Sample Translations
Sample Translations
  • Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch
  • Release: 07.09.2023
  • ISBN: 978-3-462-05080-6
  • 224 Pages
  • Author: Thomas Hettche
Sinking Stars
Thomas Hettche Sinking Stars
Joachim Gern
© Joachim Gern
Thomas Hettche

Thomas Hettche was born in a village at the edge of the Vogelsberg mountains. His essays and novels have been translated into over a dozen languages and have won numerous awards, including the Premio Grinzane Cavour, Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize, Solothurn Literature Prize and Joseph Breitbach Prize. His novel Heartstring was shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2020 and remained on the SPIEGEL bestseller list for weeks. His books have been translated into numerous languages.

Further Titles

Nox
Thomas Hettche

Nox

Show moreShow all