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Nelio Biedermann was born in Zurich in 2003, which means he wrote this multigenerational saga of Hungarian aristocratic collapse, wartime complicity, Soviet expropriation, and inherited cowardice at an age when most writers are still workshopping their first short story about a difficult childhood. He is currently studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.

Lázár was published in Germany in 2025, won the Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award, and is being translated into more than twenty languages.

The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century on the feast of Epiphany, when Baroness Mária von Lázár gives birth to a boy so translucent that the country doctor can see his organs working beneath the skin. (A metaphor for a family whose secrets are about to become very visible?)

The infant, Lajos, was fathered by Pál, the water-blue-eyed stable groom, a biographical detail that Mária preserves through an act of intellectual athleticism. She trains herself to lie by lying constantly, practicing falsehood on every question from dinner menus to existential ones, until the truth begins to feel to her like an affectation.

When Baron Sándor, proud, moustached, and constitutionally incurious, finally asks whether the boy is really his, Mária calmly informs him that the child bears a striking resemblance to the dynasty's mythological founder, Hayo the First, a man so remote in history that there is no surviving portrait to contradict her. The aristocracy has always known that the great advantage of long lineage is the total absence of living witnesses.

Around this transparent child orbits a great household cast. There is Ilona, Lajos's scheming elder sister, whose talent for strategic devastation manifests early and only deepens with practice. There is Uncle Imre, who after their father vanishes into the surrounding forest, discovers E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" by mysterious delivery and retreats so thoroughly into its gothic universe that Sándor eventually has him painted into the blue room, quite literally, the walls of which are the colour of sedation. There is the young tutor Jonathan, who leaves scented poems under Persian carpets, church pews, and rosebeds, apparently operating on the theory that the entire manor house is a suitable letter box for his desires, with consequences that are swift and violent. And there is, of course, Mária.

Lajos grows up luminous, sensitive, and hungry for escape, dreaming obsessively of great ships crossing open water. He meets Lilly Grünfeld, a Viennese Jewish girl with blue teardrop earrings that belonged to her dead mother, and loves her with the precision only the very young mistake for permanence. They build a life of champagne terraces, leather car seats, and summers on the Côte d'Azur.

Outside their windows, Europe gets progressively uglier, but ugliness at a sufficient distance has always been compatible with a good wine list. When the Germans occupy Hungary in 1944, Lajos organises the registration, labelling, ghettoisation, and deportation of three thousand five hundred Jews from Pécs to Auschwitz, and then stands under a linden tree smoking, watching the funeral procession his own paperwork helped assemble, feeling privately terrible in a way that costs him exactly nothing.

He also hides an anti-Nazi chaplain named Pontiller in the western wing of his manor house. Biedermann gives Lajos the moral complexity of allowing him to do both.

The novel's third movement belongs to Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, who inherits the family's water-blue eyes and its gift for loving people whose fate is already sealed.

His story carries the book through the Soviet takeover, Communist expropriation, the 1956 uprising, and a final departure by train that closes the century with compressed weight.

Biedermann aptly suggests that cowardice travels down a bloodline as reliably as cheekbones and good silver. The opposite of moral courage is very rarely screaming cruelty. It is, far more often, a man who looks at the ground to avoid standing out, who performs one small private act of decency and uses it to forgive himself for the much larger public act of doing what the regime requires.

That this argument has applications extending well beyond 1944 Hungary is not the novel's subtext. It is the novel's entire point.

For a writer born in 2003, the command of chronology, register, and moral architecture is alarming. The prose, in Jamie Bulloch's English translation, has the rhythmic confidence of someone who has read Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, Huysmans and Stefan Zweig with genuine hunger and then metabolised rather than imitated them. The long sentences that suddenly snap shut on a single short one. The chapter that is one single sinuous paragraph of a woman walking toward water. The sixty chapters that collectively constitute a persuasive argument against the comfortable life.

The Lázárs are glass people in the end, each generation as transparent as that first infant born on Epiphany. If you look carefully, you can see every one of their organs working, and several of them are malfunctioning in ways the family has spent a century pretending are perfectly normal.

Reading "Lázár" is the experience of being handed a perfectly polished lens and invited to look, first at them, and then, with the lens still raised, at whatever is directly behind you.

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Late capitalism and chronic self awareness had a baby, raised it on takeout, and dropped it into a Spanish advertising agency. Marisa is a thirtysomething copywriter who feels her office is a contagious disease. She clocks in, clocks out, and stares into the void in between. The void usually contains YouTube, tranquilizers, and a raccoon eating cake.

Her job is selling fantasies to strangers who need retail therapy to feel alive. A perfume becomes a personality upgrade. A lipstick becomes a life philosophy. A vacuum cleaner becomes proof you have your act together. Meanwhile, she personally believes none of it, which makes her very good at her job. Hypocrisy sells.

The plot is basically the slow simmer of her internal discontent. She hates her office, hates meetings, hates clients, hates corporate rituals, and hates the idea that she is supposed to enjoy any of it. Even her coworkers annoy her, especially the cheerful ones who worship the company as a benevolent deity handing out free pen holders.

She drifts through Madrid in a haze of Ativan and existential dread, half hoping for a work accident so she can get state paid sick leave and a break from brainstorming slogans like “The scent of memories” for products that barely deserve oxygen.

When she is not hating work, she is avoiding the existential wreckage of adulthood. She has a neighbor-with-benefits named Pablo who is basically human comfort food. She wants closeness, but not too much. She wants independence, but not too much. She wants sex, but only if she shaved.

She also wants meaning, but meaning is in short supply. Madrid is hot, her job is stupid, capitalism is hungry, and her soul feels like a potato chip that fell behind the couch last month. The universe is not subtle.

The story picks up a heavier emotional weight when something traumatic happens at her office. No spoilers, but it forces Marisa to confront the fact that she is drowning in a life designed by other people. It is the kind of wake up call that makes you look in the mirror and wonder who signed you up for any of this.

The rest of the novel follows her attempts to not completely fall apart. A workplace satire that swallowed a psychology textbook and washed it down with cheap wine. She ricochets between despair, cynicism, self analysis, and moments of fragile honesty that are almost tender if you squint.

Through it all, Madrid sits in the background like a cranky stage parent: loud, sweaty, dramatic, and strangely comforting.

The book is essentially one long, sharp, funny rant about modern adulthood, the void where ambition goes to die, and the terrifying suspicion that your life is happening without your consent. But it grew on me because it is not about the usual spoiled girls whining. It is about one woman quietly imploding while smiling politely into a webcam during a 10 am brainstorming session titled “Think PARTY.”

Slightly above average 3.5 I've-read-this-a-thosand-times-before stars are rounded up. The brisk writing helps the truth go down smoother. The truth being: we are all one team building retreat away from losing it.

The book is smarter than it pretends to be. It plays the part of a breezy corporate satire, but underneath the jokes and the influencer references, there is a steady pulse of real despair. The author sneaks in the kind of insight that makes you pause mid page, the literary equivalent of hearing a drunk friend suddenly say something profound before going back to complaining about their landlord. It is not fluff. It only looks like fluff the way meringue looks light until you realize it is ninety percent sugar.

Privileged whining is tedious, but here it is not exactly whining. It is funny, but not cute funny. More like oh great, someone has finally put my existential dread into a digestible format funny. It also pokes at the way women are expected to be competent, attractive, and emotionally balanced while capitalism holds a knife to their back and recites motivational quotes. And it says, pretty clearly, that performing happiness is not the same as having it.

An old man is yanked from the purgatory of a Viennese sanatorium and paraded onto live television like a relic dug up for laughs. They say he's Franz Wilzek, film director. He remembers Peter Alexander, maybe; Pabst, certainly; but not the film The Molander Case, which he also remembers shooting. And also remembers not shooting.

Memory here a booby trap. A program called What's New on Sunday becomes an accidental war crimes tribunal, a séance, and a comedy of errors where anecdotes and questions carry the stink of something repressed.

Of course the old man remembers directing a film he swears was never made. He was, after all, present at its non-existence. And naturally, the only thing anyone wants to know is whether Peter Alexander really said that thing about horses.

Daniel Kehlmann, with uncanny control, turns a foggy mind into a crime scene. Garbo glides through, beautiful and indifferent; Pabst drowns in Hollywood hospitality, mistaking praise for understanding; and the young editor Rosenkranz smiles like someone who knows where the bodies are buried, and which reels they're buried in. “I was there when we didn't shoot the film,” says Wilzek. And somehow, that's the most truthful thing anyone says.

The Director aims its flickering gaze straight at the soft spots of postwar amnesia, where complicity is repackaged as nostalgia and forgetfulness passes for grace. In an age where filmed lies feel more authoritative than lived truths, Kehlmann rips the powder off the broadcast face and asks: Who gets to edit the past?

When half-truths are streamed and piped into living rooms, when sentimentality launders collaboration, when cultural memory depends on the anecdotes of the demented – what's historical fact and what's programming?

This is my first Kehlmann and I find that he writes like a magician who hides razors in handkerchiefs. Dialogues are laden with theatrical absurdity, while time loops like damaged tape. The prose stutters between slapstick and dread, never allowing comfort.

Beneath the wit there's a taut structure, a perfect economy of scenes, and a rare gift for making shame both devastating and hilarious. This book misfires, spins, lies, and implicates. I'm definitely going to read more of this author's works.

G. W. Pabst was a celebrated Austrian filmmaker, known for Pandora's Box and The Joyless Street; he did leave Germany, went to Hollywood, returned during the Nazi era, and did make propaganda films for the Reich. The actresses – Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, the actors – Peter Alexander, Werner Krauss, and even the real TV host Heinz Conrads are drawn from the historical record. But Franz Wilzek, the fictional director, never existed. Nor did The Molander Case, the vanished film at the center of the book's moral hallucination.

Kehlmann has conjured a fictional memory from real cultural debris. It's historical fiction that reads like an unreliable documentary shot in one take, with half the cast pretending they weren't there.

Far from glamorizing, Kehlmann lays bare the way Nazis and their collaborators were reintegrated, rebranded, and rerun as charming old entertainers and reliable bureaucrats. The horror is how seamlessly everyone gets on with the show.

London, 1886. Mr Utterson, a lawyer of studied dullness conducting his Sunday walks in companionable silence, hears a tale from his kinsman Enfield about a small, repellent man named Edward Hyde who trampled a child in the predawn streets and paid off the witnesses with a cheque bearing the signature of one of London's most celebrated physicians.

The physician is Dr Henry Jekyll, holder of enough honorary letters after his name to fill a small almanac, and Utterson is alarmed to discover that Jekyll's will leaves his entire estate to this same Hyde, in the event of Jekyll's death or unexplained disappearance.

Utterson suspects blackmail and fears something worse, and sets out to find Hyde. What he finds is a figure so off-putting that every witness struggles to describe him. Dwarfish, deformed without a specifiable defect, radiating malevolence.

Hyde keeps a key to Jekyll's back door, draws on his accounts, and occupies a house in Soho, where fog thickens to umber. Sir Danvers Carew, an elderly MP of impeccable reputation, is beaten to death with a cane Utterson once gave Jekyll, and Hyde vanishes. Jekyll retreats from the world, appearing at a window briefly before terror closes his expression and the frame.

Dr Lanyon, once Jekyll's oldest colleague and by this point a broken man, dies weeks after witnessing something he declined to commit to paper, leaving Utterson a sealed document with instructions to hold it until Jekyll's death or disappearance. Both conditions are swiftly fulfilled.

What awaits Utterson and his locksmith inside Jekyll's cabinet is a scene of controlled devastation, a will rewritten in Jekyll's own hand, and two documents that promise at last to explain what Hyde truly is, where he came from, and what the word "disappearance" was always intended to cover.

Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in ten feverish days in 1885, reportedly burning a first draft at his wife Fanny's insistence and producing the version we have in another ten.

The speed shows, and so does the compression. The book is closer to a novella than a novel. Its central idea is too explosive to survive the sprawl of three volumes and a subplot about an inheritance.

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Adele Bertei boards a Greyhound from Cleveland in July 1977 carrying a burlap-wrapped Fender Duo-Sonic, two thrift-store suits, a hundred dollars, and a shorn head. The ideal punk curriculum vitae for the world's most aggressive job application.

Her first stop in New York City is St. Patrick's Cathedral, where she lights candles for her two great teachers: Peter Laughner, the doomed Cleveland rock polymath who handed her the guitar, and Nan Goldin, the photographer who seduced her, shot her, and expanded her entire vocabulary of desire. Below St. Michael's foot, Lucifer winks.

The city outside is a borough of amphetamine junkies and broken umbrellas rushing into drains. Bertei, twenty-two years old, a self-taught butch who spent her adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory called Blossom Hill and her early adulthood drinking in gay bars with drag queens, is about to devour it. She is carrying, she tells us, centuries of bottled-up female rage and the genetic memory of Irish women with absent fathers and Italian men who lost fingers to the mob's cookie jar.

Downtown, Bertei enters the orbit of the Contortions, the all-aggression, all-function James Brown tribute band from hell fronted by James Chance, a man whose principal compositional tool is slapping audience members. The scene around them is a magnificent disaster of talent: Anya Phillips, the dominatrix-manager whose sex work funds the avant-garde; Lydia Lunch, teenage fury in a schoolgirl dress; Kathy Acker, ransacking the canon for sexed-up sacrilege; Nan Goldin photographing everyone into mythology; and Diego Cortez, the social fulcrum who connects everyone to everything including, eventually, Brian Eno.

Eno produces the No New York compilation after witnessing a Contortions set so violent that Village Voice critic Robert Christgau is forced to physically sit on James Chance to stop the carnage. Bowie, watching from nearby, later appears on the cover of Lodger dressed in a rumpled suit with limbs askew, which may be an homage or a hostage photograph.

After the Contortions Bertei forms the Bloods, an all-lesbian band that plays the First International Women's Rock Festival in Berlin, spray-paints THE BLOODS RULE on the Berlin Wall, nearly dies from Dutch heroin of lethal purity, and eventually plays an opening set for Van Morrison in a different key from each other.

Amsterdam provides a lesbian commune, a poker table with switchblades on it, and a houseboat on the Prinsengracht directly across the canal from Anne Frank's hiding place, where Bertei reads Hannah Arendt and Benjamin and begins to ask whether she has been reckless.

The Bloods dissolve, their twenty-year-old roadie Bobby Battery dies of an overdose, and Bertei wraps a tourniquet around her heart. What comes after, in the corporate music world, is a different and considerably more expensive kind of violence.

Adele Bertei grew up without a floor beneath her. A mother lost to schizophrenia, a stepfather who lost his decency to cruelty, and an adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory where she learned to be a butch daddy before she learned to play guitar. She survived all of it, moved to New York, made serious noise, and then wrote the book to prove it happened.

The women of No Wave were the scene, and every prior chronicle had treated them as decoration on someone else's monument. Bertei makes the case with her body, her diary, and her considerable fury that women like Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, and Pat Place were generating the voltage while the men were getting the album credits.

Every creative industry still operates a quiet system of attribution drift, where women's contributions age into the margins while men's become mythology. Bertei's corrective arrives late and she is aware of it. This gives the book the charge, the irritation of the betrayed who watched history get written wrong and waited long enough to be absolutely certain of the facts.

The memoir is exhilarating and self-serving in equal measure, but that is what a good memoir ought to be.

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