The wall - Marlen Haushofer

A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.

'One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I've ever read, as well as one of the best' Susan Choi

'Every joint and sinew of the story is restless with a sense of threat' London Review of Books

'Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling.' Nicole Krauss

TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE