Two Berlin thirty-somethings, Jakob and Isabelle, meet at a party and arrange to see each other again on the evening of September 11, 2001. Despite this ill-fated start to their affair, they soon marry and not long after move to London, where Jakob will take the post of a colleague killed in the World Trade Center attack. But both newlyweds soon find themselves seduced by their respective vices, and their relationship, like the world they once knew and the happiness they once shared, proves more fragile and fragmented with each passing day.

Katharina Hacker writes about love and violence, about destruction and the way global events encroach upon individual lives, about excessive personal liberty and the inability to feel oneself truly free. She has given her readers something of a Bright Lights, Big City for the post-9/11 era. The jury of the German Book Award praised Hacker for having had the courage to confront some of our most pressing issues. “Her protagonists are in their thirties,” wrote the jurors. “They know it all and yet of one thing they know nothing: themselves. They drift and yet are driven . . . Their questions are our questions.”

Katharina Hacker
Katharina Hacker’s previous books, Morpheus (2003) and The Lifeguard (2000), have earned her a reputation as one of the most discerning and elegant stylists in contemporary German literature. Born in 1967 in Frankfurt, she has lived in Berlin since 1996. Hacker's German Book Prize Listen to an interview with Katharina Hacker in Deutche Radio's "Inspired Minds" podcast

• Jul 1 2008
  The Scotsman: "to get everything out of [The have-Nots] you should probably read it at least twice. It is good enough to deserve that attention."
  
• Mar 31 2008
  The Boston Globe: "The title characters, the have-nots of this unsettling novel, are not its protagonists but rather features of the human landscape in which its more advantaged central characters act out their amorphous crises."
  
• Mar 26 2008
  Three Percent: "In the four—really many more than that—simultaneous stories, dozens of lives perform work on the others; each story acts as a cog, turning the others in a gloriously complex movement that anyone could appreciate."
  
• Feb 19 2008
  Rapsheet: "The Have-Nots has won lots of prizes, raves, and sales in her native Germany, and now, thanks to the bold folk at Europa Editions, promises to shake up American readers who don’t see that many German thrillers as good as this."
  
• Feb 1 2008
  Library Journal: "Hacker’s plain sentences and long paragraphs bring to mind William Faulkner’s deceptively simple narrative style. This honest portrayal of the dark side of the human psyche understandably won the 2006 German Book Prize for best novel."
  
• Dec 8 2007
  Publishers Weekly: "Hacker's prose, aided by Atkins's pristine translation, soars, particularly in her treatment of city and bourgeois life...she admirably explores modern urban life from the unsettled haves to the desperate have-nots."