Description
An artist's life hangs in the balance between creative freedom and tyranny in this gripping novel about cinema's greatest director.
When G.W. Pabst flees Nazi Germany for Hollywood, he discovers that fame offers no refuge, not even Greta Garbo's loyalty can restore his standing.
Forced back to Austria, now renamed Ostmark, Pabst faces an impossible choice: resist the regime's seductive promises or surrender to propaganda minister Goebbels' relentless demands.
Daniel Kehlmann masterfully explores the dangerous illusions of power and art, tracing how a visionary can slip into complicity without realizing the cost.
This is a novel about the choices that define us, the compromises that destroy us, and the terrifying ease with which idealism becomes entanglement.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026 and winner of the New Statesman Fiction Book of the Year 2025, The Director proves what literature is truly capable of—revealing the human soul in its darkest hour.
Paperback 352 pages.
Approx: 12.8 x 19.7cm.