MONSCHAU

• Steffen Kopetzky’s gripping novel about a love affair during a state of emergency.
  
• 80,000 copies sold and for several weeks on the Spiegel bestseller list!
• English sample translation of the complete book available.
  

Steffen Kopetzky tells a love story in a state of emergency, against the backdrop of rapid economic growth in Germany – transforming a chapter of German history into gripping literature.

In 1962, when the nuclear arms race is reaching its climax, when bombs are exploding in Algiers and Paris and Germany is in the midst of its economic miracle, young doctor Nikolaos Spyridakis sets off to the Eifel region. It’s a delicate mission: smallpox has broken out in the district of Monschau. The disease is highly contagious and dangerous. In the middle of carnival, there’s a threat of lockdown and quarantine. The boss of the local Rither factory wants to keep it open at all costs - business is good in the years following World War II. Vera, the sole heiress of the Rither family, has quite different plans: she is studying in Paris, admires Simone de Beauvoir and brings an avant-garde spirit to Monschau. There she meets Nikolaos, who is driven through the snow-covered Eifel to attend patients as the company doctor, protected from infection by a steelworker’s overalls. Though they are very different - the Cretan doctor, who as a child witnessed the horrors of the German occupation, and the wealthy orphan - they soon discover that they have more in common than their love for jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. But the cases increase, and the virus takes what it can get.

“I enjoyed Steffen Kopetzky’s PROPAGANDA a great deal. It’s a fast-paced and exciting novel about World War II and the 1970s, and a tale about how a young idealist becomes a jaded agent of psychological warfare and propaganda. And the novel offers the added layer of a highly lauded German writer examining the American psyche and character.” - Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer