Chiaroscuro is a novel about art and power, about the creator and the totalitarian state, about fear, temptation, and evil. The story centers on the fate of the great director Georg Wilhelm Pabst: a cinematic genius and émigré forced to return to Hitler's Reich. He still believes he will not succumb to the temptation of collaborating with a barbaric, inhumane regime, that he will submit to no dictatorship other than the dictatorship of art, but he has already taken the first step toward a trap from which he will never escape...

German and Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann was born in 1975 in Munich. A star of contemporary German prose, he is one of the greatest living novelists, and the author of the bestsellers Die Metersgemeinschaft, F, and Til. He is the winner of numerous literary awards and a nominee for the Man Booker International Prize. Kehlmann's style combines the authenticity and precision of realism with a perfectly measured dose of phantasmagoria—in this respect, heir to the ancient traditions of German literature.

The novel "Chiaroscuro" is terrifying and beautiful. It is beautiful not only for its relevance (although many moments seem lifted from today's news or social media debates), but above all for the author's mastery: Kehlmann writes in a way that immediately makes it clear that we are dealing with a master of the literary elite. Telling stories about people in cinema, the novel unfolds before us like a real film—with visible, precise mise-en-scènes.

"All this madness, Franz, this hellish madness gives us the opportunity to make a great film. Without us, everything would be exactly the same; no one would be better off, no one would be saved. Only this film wouldn't exist..."