Books open doors and cross borders
Church door in Semlac © Iris Wolff
MOTH BOOKS publishes outstanding fiction and non fiction with a strong emphasis on women’s voices. Founded in London in 2023, we cross borders and make connections, particularly with Europe.
The imprint's first book was Monique Charlesworth’s candid and witty memoir Mother Country: a story of love and lies, one of three shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2024.
Moth Books has also published a paperback edition of Monique’s acclaimed novel, The Children’s War, with a new ending.
Out this month : Blurred, the award-winning novel by brilliant author, Iris Wolff, translated by Ruth Martin. Seven voices tell the story of one man through his family and friends. This is a novel of huge geographical and historical scope, covering 100 years and four generations in the Banat, now Transylvania, in just 200 pages.
Moth Books will soon publish another magnificent novel of family and conflict in the heart of Europe: Worlds Apart by Julia Franck.
Coming in 2026: the outstanding new novel Clearing by Iris Wolff, a best-seller in Germany, which was shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2024.
Out now
Blurred
Compact and vivid, this powerful novel of migration, identity and loss is deeply informed by the fall of the Eastern block and by Iris Wolff’s own family history in the Banat. Threaded with Iris’s characteristic depth and wit, the novel is plotted with originality and inventiveness.
Blurred can be ordered here.
Iris Wolff has won numerous awards of great cultural and literary significance. Blurred, her fourth book, has been extensively reviewed and praised. She has been touring Europe to promote her work, and this week was in London talking about the book with publisher Monique Charlesworth and translator Ruth Martin.
Also available
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Mother Country
The true story of the passionate and tragicomic relationship between a mother running away from her past in Hitler’s Germany, and a daughter running towards it. Now available as a Moth Books paperback, ebook and audio book. -
The Children's War
A moving and powerful coming-of-age novel set in war-torn Europe, this is fiction at its most gripping. Now available as a Moth Books paperback, ebook and audio book, updated with a new ending.
Authors
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Monique Charlesworth
Born in Birkenhead, Monique Charlesworth is half German and her work has a European bias. A graduate of the National Film and Television School, she spent a decade writing scripts for film and television. Fluent in French and German she started her working life as a journalist and has published four acclaimed novels. She is currently working on a novel that completes her German trilogy.
Image: © Alex Lifschutz
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Iris Wolff
Iris Wolff, born behind the iron curtain in the medieval town of Sibiu, Transylvania in 1977, is an award-winning writer whose work carries the reader deep into her former homeland. The fate of those who stay and those who choose to migrate is the constant and powerful theme weaving through her novels.
Image: © Max Goedecke
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Julia Franck
Julia Franck is a celebrated author and journalist living in Berlin whose work has been translated into more than forty languages. The recipient of numerous awards, she has written five novels, short stories and has edited essays. Two of her novels have been made into feature films. Her work is deeply preoccupied with recent German history, family and motherhood.
Image: © Mathias Bothor