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Mar 31, 2025 By Frank Valish

Robert Seethaler’s The Café with No Name has already become a #1 bestseller in Germany and has remained on the bestseller list for 40 weeks. Now released in this English translation, Seethaler’s beatific novel can be appreciated by a whole new constituency of readers.

The Café with No Name is set in Vienna during the 1960s and ’70s, a community still recovering from the horrors of war. Robert Simon, a young man somewhat adrift, living in the spare space of a widower, sees an abandoned café and decides to lease it. He refurbishes the space, making it his own, somewhere that members of the community, butchers, boxers, a vicar, and various and sundry individuals from about town can come to find communion, a glass of wine, a light meal, or a beer.

Not a whole lot happens in Seethaler’s novel. There is no particular climax. No thrilling action. It is a gentle book featuring a community that comes together around the daily life struggles of each of its characters, who come and go throughout these pages, living their own lives that intersect meaningfully with Simon’s nameless café. By the book’s end, Simon has found himself a carved-out little life with the found family of his customers. Despite the grand party at the book’s end, there are no grand revelations in The Café with No Name. Simply life, being what you make it, through all variety of circumstances, finding hope and community where you create it for yourself. (www.europaeditions.com)

Author rating: 7/10