DIE GERMANISTIN: Riveting Forays into German-Language Literature by Sheridan Marshall. ZEIT DER MUTIGEN (‘The Time of Heroes’) – Dimitré Dinev’s Epic Return to the European Stage
Winner of the 2025 Austrian Book Prize, Dimitré Dinev’s Zeit der Mutigen (‘The Time of Heroes’, Kein & Aber, 2025) is one of the most striking novels in the German-language landscape this year. Vast in scope and monumental in scale, this 1,152-page epic offers a tender, tragicomic portrait of the last century in Central and Eastern Europe. If you’re a reader who gravitates towards the moral clarity of Sebastian Barry, the emotional lyricism of Anthony Doerr, or the elegant, long-view storytelling of Kate Atkinson, this is absolutely a book you’ll want on your radar.
Dinev is already well loved for his 2003 novel Engelszungen (‘Angels’ Tongues’), and for more than a decade, readers have been waiting for his next major work. With ‘The Time of Heroes’, he delivers something both intimate and monumental: a meditation on courage, endurance, and the fragile ways people keep each other alive through the darkest eras of European history.
The novel opens in Vienna, just before the First World War, where we meet Eva Nagel, a young maid falsely accused of theft. In despair, she walks to the Danube intending to end her life. Instead, she is pulled from the water by a young officer, Alois Kozusnik – an encounter that links their fates and sets a century of interconnected stories in motion.
When war breaks out, Eva volunteers on a hospital ship. Dinev captures both the brutality and the strange moments of tenderness that arise amid catastrophe. When Eva encounters Alois again, he is wounded, dying, and unable to recognise her. Her compassion collides with her grief in a devastating moment that shapes the rest of her life.
From there, the novel sweeps outward. Dinev traces not only Eva’s descendants but the “spiritual heirs” of that first generation: soldiers, refugees, labourers, artists, and the ordinary people whose quiet acts of love or cruelty redirect the course of families for decades. The Danube becomes the novel’s steady heartbeat, a river of memory carrying both the dead and the living toward change.
What makes the book special is not simply the scale of events, but how Dinev shows history pressing on individual bodies. Lives intersect across borders and wars; identities fracture and reform; guilt, mercy, and hope shift from one generation to the next like stories whispered at night.
Dinev’s great strength is his moral precision. Even with so much violence, displacement and heartbreak, the novel never tips into melodrama. His prose has the measured clarity of fable: luminous, pared-back, and often very funny in the darkest moments.
He writes with sympathy for human frailty, especially the way people stumble through history without understanding its full weight. What emerges is a deeply humane perspective: survival is not heroic so much as stubborn; compassion is not easy, but essential; and the central question, ‘What makes someone human?, is answered not in ideas but in actions.
The novel’s length becomes one of its greatest strengths. It allows Dinev to build a world thick with history, memory, and interwoven lives – giving readers the immersive experience of living alongside his characters as their choices ripple outward across decades. If you’re drawn to large-scale, multi-generational narratives with emotional depth and historical sweep, The Time of Heroes will be exactly your kind of book. It will appeal to readers who enjoy epic storytelling in the tradition of Nino Haratischwili’s The Eighth Life or Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See – novels that invite you to live inside their world for hundreds of pages.
The clarity of Dinev’s German makes the text particularly inviting for translation and international readerships. ‘The time of Heroes’ will appeal to anyone interested in 20th century history, the entanglements of Central and Eastern Europe, or the ways private lives intersect with public catastrophe.
‘The Time of Heroes’ marks a remarkable return for one of Austria’s most perceptive storytellers. It is brief in length but vast in scope, handling weighty themes – violence, guilt, compassion, memory – with a light and deeply empathetic touch. Dinev reminds us that history is not an abstraction but something lived one wound, one secret, one small act of love at a time.
This is a novel full of broken lives, stubborn hope, and the quiet persistence of humanity. A major literary achievement and one of the year’s essential epic reads.
By Sheridan Marshall
Dimitré Dinev’s novel was selected by New Books in German, and is therefore eligible to receive funding to support its translation into English. for more information please see here.
Sheridan Marshall works as a translator from German into English, and as Editorial Consultant for New Books in German. She was Deputy Editor of The Austrian Riveter.
Read previous posts in Die Germanistin series:
Leave a Reply