Alfred Döblin

A marriage gone horribly wrong; a secret female friendship and affair; a murder plot. This precursor to the true crime genre is told by Alfred Döblin, one of the giants of 20th-century German literature and author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which was named a Guardian Top 100 Books of All Time. What would it take for a woman to poison her...

Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb translation by Michael Hofmann. The subject of this book is the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff, and now he is back in...