Im Krebsgang

Published in English as Crabwalk, this novel centres on the sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945, when thousands of refugees and soldiers were lost in the Baltic Sea. The narrator, a journalist born on the night of the disaster, tries to understand it through his difficult mother and his teenage son, who is drawn to extremist ideas online. The book asks why such suffering was long left unspoken in Germany, and what happens to memory when it is ignored. It moves sideways through time, like a crab.