Cornelia Funke tells stories of fairies and mud monsters, of adventurous girls, a gang of children in Venice ? and her stories somewhere between fantasy and adventure are Germany?s most successful literary export at the moment....
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It is Christmas of 2006 and I am in our ancestral home in Abba, a small dusty village in Anambra State. It is a joyful time, my parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and distant relatives are catching up and laughing and eating. There is a new bustling motor park just outside our gates. In the morning, horning wakes me up. My uncle is pleased that Abba is 'developing' – a motel has been built, more expensive houses are springing up, there is a tiny shop nearby that rents Nigerian and foreign films. But I find myself noting only how things have changed. We spent every Christmas in Abba when I was a child and I remember how it was not as noisy, how there were fewer cars, less aggression. My cousins say maybe it was quieter, but we also had to go and fetch water from the stream. Now we have water tanks. Most of all, I remember how much cooler Abba used to be.
Christmas falls into harmattan, the short season of heat during the day and cold in the evenings when winds whip through and cover everything with a thin film of yellow-brown, when we rub globs of Vaseline into our skin and lips to prevent cracking. But the harmattan feels different this Christmas. It is much hotter. And in the evenings, the weather seems undecided; one night it is incredibly hot so that I lie on my bed with my skin and bedsheets clammy with sweat. On another night, the temperature dips and I wear a sweater, tie a scarf around my neck. Something is happening to the weather and to the world that baffles me. I feel helpless thinking about it. I see, in my mind, a picture of Abba getting so hot that it is unbearable for anybody. Or perhaps I am imagining this change, perhaps it is because I have film images of melting ice in my mind.
After Christmas, I go to Lagos and the heat is unbearable, makes it difficult to breathe. It saps my energy. To be in a car without air conditioning is torture. Was it always like this? People walk around with dark sweat patches under their arms. I watch the old cars and buses in the traffic that cough out deep gray exhaust fumes and I wonder how connected it all is: the exhaust, my air conditioning, the unbearable heat. Next to the car in which I am riding, a bus driver has his elbow resting on the open window of his bus, which is so old and creaky it looks like harsh piece of metal held together. He is drinking a plastic sachet of Pure Water and he later flings the sachet through the window. He overtakes us. The fumes from his car are almost black. I wonder how much of a luxury it is, this awareness of weather change that I have. I wonder if, in his struggle to make enough naira to feed his family, the taxi driver has the time to worry about how much hotter the weather has become.
*
The story, written in English, originally appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on March 11, 2007.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria. Her first novel, "Purple Hibiscus," received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (2005). Her second novel, "Half of a Yellow Sun" is set before and during the Biafran War. She is now pursuing graduate work in African Studies at Yale University. In June 2007 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi was awarded the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction for "Half of a Yellow Sun."
RSS
The headlines were stolen by Charlotte Roche's moist little sex shocker and Jonathan Littell's sprawling SS fantasies but only two books united the critics: one is good and the other, utterly objectionable. There was a flurry of interest in some fabulous comics and a resurgence of the political and the historical novel. A dip into the books published in Germany this spring.
The nonfiction books this spring look into life as a budding president, a kitchen slave, a prophet, a string quartet. They pick apart the world of the elites, of lust and taste and '68.
Travels through the dreams and nightmares of Europe, in a small land of great poets, torn between Balkan catastrophe and Brussels. A reportage on Croatia, this year's partner country at the Leipzig Book Fair. By Gregor Dotzauer 
An SS man reflects on mass murder - and there's a pigeon hole for every vile deed. Novelist Georg Klein on the Holocaust and the enlightened harmony of trivial realism in Jonathan Littell's novel "Les Bienveillantes" which has just been translated into German.
The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel,"Les Bienveillantes," has put the German-language feuilletons into a critical frenzy, despite the general consensus that the book is bad. We have compiled a selection of the accusations hurled. 
Kurt von Hammerstein was head of the Reichswehr, a grand seigneur, and an implacable opponent of National Socialism. In his new book "Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn" (Hammerstein or idiosycrasy), Hans Magnus Enzensberger engages in dialogues with the dead to deliver a literary and lunatic precipitate of German history.
This literary autumn belongs to two Russian writers: Vassily Grossmann and Varlam Shalamov, whose epic works have been published in German at long last. But older Germans and German Romantics, Polish queens, Romanian Mannerists, combative atheists, Neopolitan Camorristi, Catalonian knights and a glutton of glorious abandon have also come up trumps.
The literary event of the season is the inexplicably delayed publication of two Russian masterpieces: Vassily Grossmann's historic drama of the 20th century "Life and Fate" and Varlam Shalamov's collection of tales from Kolyma "Durch den Schnee". On the German side, we have seen older novelists flexing their muscles and reaching for the skies, biographers looking up to bygone giants, and the feuilletons rallying to defend religion against the air strikes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. 
The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
Romanian literature is still a tiny niche in the German book
market. Mircea Cartarescu's latest novel to be published here,
"Die Wissenden," shows readers what they are missing. A visit to
Bucharest to meet the man who is probably Romania's most famous author. By Jörg Plath
Come cruising in the park they say is dead. In his
biography of Stefan George, Thomas Karlauf reveals the charismatic German poet's authoritarian practices and the homoerotic core of his work. By Alexander Cammann
Rüdiger Safranski has pulled off the improbable: his book on Romanticism is a genuinely exciting account of German intellectual history. By Ulrich Greiner
Germany's book market is being flooded this autumn by biographies of dead male writers. Ina Hartwig examines the whys, wherefores and potential pitfalls of this latest literary craze.
The German Book Prize 2007, an annual award for the best German language novel, has been awarded to Julia Franck. Read an English excerpt of her book, "Lady Midday", and of the other five on the shortlist.