'Great EU novel' to MacLehose

MacLehose Press has acquired a "great European Union novel" set in the Brussels headquarters by Austrian writer Robert Menasse.

Katharina Bielenberg, associate publisher at MacLehose Press, signed UK and Commonwealth rights to Menasse's Die Hauptstadt (Capital City) from Nora Mercurio at Suhrkamp Verlag, with sales made in five further territories.

Part satire, part farce, part crime novel, and against the real-life backdrop of a Europe in crisis, the novel begins with a pig on the loose in the centre of Brussels. The pig reappears throughout this broad canvas of ambitious bureaucrats who jostle with one another in the Commission, as well as those who are old enough to remember how the EU came into being in the first place – from the ashes of war and devastation. The 50th anniversary of the founding of the Commission is approaching, but how best to celebrate this anniversary? 

In Germany, the novel came out on 11th September and has so far sold 45,000 copies, according to the publisher. It has received "excellent reviews" in German press, with Die Zeit calling it “an elegantly written, brilliantly constructed novel, full of discussion points and ideas”. It has also been shortlisted for the German Book Prize, the winner of which will be announced on Monday 9th October in Frankfurt ahead of Frankfurt Book Fair.

Bielenberg said of the "timely" title: “At last, the great EU novel, by a major figure in European literature. Robert Menasse’s highly entertaining, satirical and provocative book ripples with ideas, at its heart a solemn reminder of what lay at the foundations of the European project in the first place – post-national unity. Our publication on the eve of Brexit could not be more timely.”
 
MacLehose Press will publish in February 2019.