Wolfgang Herrndorf · 2010 · road

Herrndorf's road novel, published in English as Why We Took the Car. Two fourteen-year-old outsiders take a stolen Lada out of Berlin one summer heading for Wallachia, where one of them says his grandfather lives - and get lost immediately, because they forgot a map. They never arrive, which is not the point.

1. 1
   Marzahn

   A tower-block district on the eastern edge of Berlin, where Andrej Tschichatschow lives - the Russian-German boy nobody sits next to, who turns up at Maik's door in the school holidays with a stolen Lada Niva.

2. 2
   Berlin

   Maik Klingenberg's empty house with a pool, two hundred euros of pocket money, a mother in rehab and a father away with a colleague - and a party he was not invited to, which is why he gets in the car.

3. 3
   Brandenburg

   South-east into the flat country outside the city with no map, because they forgot one - the whole comedy of the book being two fourteen-year-olds navigating by instinct toward a place neither can find on a map anyway.

4. 4
   Saxony

   Deeper into the east: a rubbish dump where they pick up Isa, a rich family's dinner table, a speech therapist's village, and a woman with five children who feeds them - Germany seen from the height of a stolen car.

5. 5
   The Erzgebirge

   The ore mountains near the Czech border, as far south as they get - and Wallachia, which is in Romania and which Tschick's grandfather may or may not live in, stays a thousand kilometres off.

6. 6
   Berlin

   The crash, the hospital and the court - and Maik goes home changed, which is the only thing a Bildungsroman has to deliver, and Herrndorf delivers it without a word of sentiment.