Seagull Books, 2026

Judith Keller brings her usual brand of refreshing, comic absurdity to her novel Wilde Manöver, awarded the 2024 Swiss Literature Prize. The central narrative recounts a day in the lives of Vera and Peli, two women who, in a burst of self-empowerment, create works of performance art from stolen lawn ornaments and furniture. They were ostensibly directed by local construction cranes and may or may not have been involved in the drug trade. Their adventure is framed both by a police interview conducted shortly after Vera’s apprehension on charges of auto theft, drug-smuggling, and vandalism in the summer of 2025 and by a report of historical research into that interrogation conducted seven decades later in 2098.
            During the police interview, Vera gives confusing, fantastical answers to the inspector before disappearing from the station during a power cut. Three years after the interrogation, elements of Vera’s implausible account seem to have been coming true. Seven decades later, the signs and symbols that Vera and Peli scattered throughout Zurich on their spree in 2025 appear to be keys to explaining the state of the world in 2098.
In her recent story collection, The Questionable Ones, Judith Keller reveals the extraordinary lurking inside the ordinary and the ordinary at the core of the extraordinary. In this novel, she ups the ante on unreliable narrators and keeps readers constantly alert to multiple alternative explanations and plausible implausibilities.

"I have rarely read anything this refreshing, bold and funny." Saša Stanišić 

More at New Books in German

Judith Keller was born in Switzerland in 1985, studied creative writing in Leipzig and Biel, and qualified as a German language teacher in Berlin and Bogotá. She has also been an editor at the literary journal Edit. She won honorary awards from the city and canton of Zurich for her story collection The Questionable Ones, translated by Tess Lewis (Seagull Books 2023).