The Director
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026
Published on 22. May 2025
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-5294-3511-5 (ISBN)
Description
'Supple, horrifying and mordantly droll' New York Times
'Nothing short of brilliant' Wall Street Journal
'A subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power' Sunday Times
'A dazzling performance and a real page turner' Salman Rushdie
From 'one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today' (Jeffrey Eugenides), a visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich.
An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.
'Nothing short of brilliant' Wall Street Journal
'A subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power' Sunday Times
'A dazzling performance and a real page turner' Salman Rushdie
From 'one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today' (Jeffrey Eugenides), a visionary tale inspired by the life of the 20th century film director G.W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood to resist the Nazis and then returned to his homeland with his wife and young son and began making films for the German Reich.
An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. The returning family is confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. But Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin, wants the film genius, he won't take no for an answer and makes big promises. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.
Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.
Reviews / Votes
A wonderful book about complicity and the complicity of art. It's also funny, and brilliant. -- ZADIE SMITH, author of The Fraud, via the Ezra Klein Show Daniel Kehlmann is shockingly brilliant, a writer of extraordinary range and grace. At times absurdist, at times horrifyingly realist, The Director asks where the moral duty of the artist resides, and how the narcissism of the artistic project can bleed into complicity. -- Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds The Director is engrossing and luminous, an epic act of historical imagination and an intimate parable about moral compromise and the seductions of art. After Tyll, I wasn't sure how Kehlmann could possibly top himself. He has. This book is a marvel. * Ayad Akhtar * Daniel Kehlmann, the finest German writer of his generation, takes on the life of the eminent film director G. W. Pabst to weave a tragicomic historical fantasia that stretches from Hollywood to Nazi Germany, from Garbo to Goebbels, to show how even a great artist can make, and be unmade by, moral compromises with evil. A dazzling performance and a real page turner. * Salman Rushdie * An incomparably accomplished and inventive piece of fiction by one of the most intelligent novelists at work today. * Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex * Clear-eyed and propulsive . . . a searing look at the mechanics of complicity * Publishers Weekly * Smartly entertaining...a marvelous performance - not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing * The New York Times * Engrossing . . . lands in the United States at a good time . . . With a page-turning narrative that is both technically sophisticated and intellectually engaging, The Director sits at the charmed intersection of commercial and literary fiction * Julia M. Klein, Los Angeles Times * Daniel Kehlmann has produced a subtle, often darkly funny novel about the relationship between art and power as exemplified by a brilliant man who loses his way in a moral maze * Sunday Times (Pick of the Month) * Daniel Kehlmann's engrossing seventh novel, The Director, proves his mastery of the historical form in reconceiving the life of G. W. Pabst. * The Telegraph * A compelling narrative . . . that combines darkness and humour as it traces Pabst's descent into ever nastier places as he chases cinematic glory * Financial Times * Exhilarating . . . a complex entertainment - a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura . . .[by] the leading German novelist of his generation . . . an irrepressible trickster, an endlessly fertile maker of fictional modes. * New Yorker * Wonderful . . . one of the best novels of the year * New European * The Director, Kehlmann's stunning tale of what failure looks like, is a call to strengthen our spines -- Susan Neiman * New York Review of Books * Kehlmann is a master . . . moral compromises lie at the heart of this superbly imagined novel * Mail on Sunday * A thrilling, vivid reconstruction of famous people caught up in the web of infamous times . . . one of the most provocative and entertaining novels of the year so far * RTE Guide * The Director has all the darkness, shapeshifting ambiguity and glittering unease of a modern Grimms' fairytale: it is Kehlmann's best work yet. * Guardian * Less a poet and more an architect, [Kehlmann] constructs over the course of this novel an unvarnished and unmistakable sense of impending doom . . . magnificent * TLS * Darkly comic * FT (Best Summer Books of 2025) * Blending fact and fiction, this tale is a study of art and complicity * The Economist (Best Novels in the Second Quarter of 2025) * [The Director] immerses us in a world thick with fear, corruption and self-deception. . . Is it an impressionistic novel about memory? A meta-novel about cinema, effected in a cinematic style recalling that of its title character? . . . The answer is: all these things, and engrossingly so . . . The Director affords us the luxury of historical distance, subtly makes us wonder whether we would in the same place do better than the hapless, self-deceiving Pabst * Jewish Chronicle * This darkly funny book about power, manipulation and complicity in the 1930s feels very relevant to the present -day political climate . . . Daniel Kehlmann is strong on how quickly fear and corruption become normalised * Sunday Times * A warning from history . . . The Director is a thrillingly bold fiction of a man trapped in the embrace of the Reich; a yarn that is brilliantly entertaining and thumpingly resonant * RTE Guide (Summer Reads 2025) * Engrossing and disturbing by turns, it proves [Kehlmann's] mastery of the historical form * Telegraph (The Greatest Books of 2025) *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Quercus Publishing
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
N/A
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
562 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5294-3511-5 (9781529435115)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2025
Quercus
€6.49
Available for download
Persons
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Vienna, Berlin and New York. He has published six novels: Measuring the World, Me & Kaminski, Fame, F, You Should Have Left and Tyll and has won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Doderer Prize, The Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the biggest successes in post-war German literature.