Not Thomas Mann
Everybody is talking about a novel that I loved, Die Zeit der Mutigen (Kein und Aber Verlag) by Dimitri Dinev, a Bulgarian author who lives in Vienna and writes in German: a multivocal, multilayered 800-page generational tale of the history of Bulgaria, very absorbing.
The other book some people here hate and some love is Lázár (Rowohlt) by Nelio Biedermann.
Biederman is incredibly young, twenty-one or twenty- two, and he wrote a novel about his Hungarian family story. It’s very postmodern in its approach, creating a sort of a pastiche of an old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian novel. People are calling him a new Thomas Mann. He is a very talented writer but in my opinion not Thomas Mann.