The Frankfurt Book Fair New York's Book of the Month for July is Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf, translated by Tim Mohr and published in June by New York Review Books Classics.
Frankfurt Book Fair New York described the book this way: "North Africa, 1972. While the world is reeling from the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a series of mysterious events is playing out in the Sahara. Four people are murdered in a hippie commune, a suitcase full of money disappears, and a pair of unenthusiastic detectives are assigned to investigate. In the midst of it all, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out...
"This darkly sophisticated literary thriller, the last novel Wolfgang Herrndorf completed before his untimely death in 2013, is, in the words of Michael Maar, 'the greatest, grisliest, funniest, and wisest novel of the past decade.' Certainly no reader will ever forget it."
Herrndorf studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, then worked as a magazine illustrator in Berlin. He published his first novel, In Plüschgewittern (Storm of Plush), in 2002. In 2007, his collection of short stories, Diesseits des Van-Allen-Gürtels (This Side of the Van Allen Belt), received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize Audience Award. In early 2010, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor; his novel Tschick (Why We Took the Car) was published just months later and was eventually translated into 24 languages. Sand was released in 2011; it was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. His posts on Arbeit und Struktur (Work and Structure), the blog he started after receiving his cancer diagnosis, have been published as a book of the same name. An unfinished sequel to Tschick, Bilder einer großen Liebe (Pictures of Your True Love), was released in 2014.
Tim Mohr has translated the work of such authors as Alina Bronsky, Stefanie de Velasco, and Charlotte Roche, as well as Wolfgang Herrndorf's novel Tschick. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Playboy, and New York magazine, among other publications. His history of East German punk rock, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, will be published in September by Algonquin Books.