The Wall

This is Max Annas' first novel to be translated into English and his debut into North America. He is one of the featured writers in Akashic's Berlin Noir.

Max Annas' novel The Wall is framed almost like a film production, which is not surprising for a man known in Germany as a film and music critic. With nods to everyone from Tarantino to Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers, this winner of the 2017 German Crime Fiction Prize tackles head-on the issues of gun violence, racism and exclusion in contemporary South Africa - problems that are equally relevant to the racially troubled United States.

Max constructs his novel around 115 compact chapters, using a shifting array of perspectives to provide varied viewpoints on the events that reach an explosive climax inside the gated community known as The Pines. All told, the novel spans a mere few hours of a single afternoon, but within that timeframe, Max compresses all of the violence and inequality in South Africa's history into a single very bloody moment, revealing how quickly the veneer of civility and justice can slip away.