Daniel Kehlmann Books in Order

Explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss pursue radically different ways of understanding the world. Their eccentric lives converge in nineteenth-century Berlin, where scientific ambition collides with personal limitations and political upheaval.

Unsuccessful journalist Sebastian Zollner plans to secure his career by writing the definitive biography of elderly painter Manuel Kaminski. His effort to manipulate the artist goes awry when Kaminski’s own agenda draws them into an unpredictable journey.

Nine interconnected episodes explore fame, anonymity, and unstable identities through misplaced phone calls, vanished recognition, and confused lives. As characters’ paths overlap, the boundaries between their stories and the people telling them begin to break down.

After their father disappears and becomes a celebrated author, three brothers grow into troubled lives shaped by doubt, fraud, and forgery. Their reunion before the financial crisis exposes the precarious beliefs and deceptions holding their worlds together.

On Christmas Eve, a philosophy professor is detained and questioned about a possible terrorist attack. As time runs short, she and the officer confronting her battle over evidence, suspicion, and whether the state is protecting itself or inventing a threat.

A celebrated but fading writer agrees to mentor a rising literary talent at a country retreat. Their competing egos turn artistic guidance into a comic confrontation over success, authority, and whose work deserves to endure.

A screenwriter rents a mountain house with his wife and young daughter while working on a sequel. Shifting rooms and unexplained writing in his notebook turn creative strain and marital tension into a disturbing threat he cannot understand.

Trickster and traveling performer Tyll Ulenspiegel moves through a Germany devastated by the Thirty Years’ War. His encounters with rulers, villagers, and rival schemers expose the absurdities of power and the stubborn pursuit of freedom amid destruction.

Film director G.W. Pabst escapes Nazi Europe for Hollywood, then returns to Austria and becomes entangled with the regime he meant to avoid. His ambition and belief in artistic independence are tested by propaganda, coercion, and compromise.