The Caf with No Name

(Paperback, Export/Airside - Export/Airside/Ireland)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a caf on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little caf, and to Robert's dream.

A story of the hopes, kindnesses and everyday heroism of one community, The Caf with No Name has charmed millions of European readers. It is an unforgettable novel about how we carry each other through good and bad times, and how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.

Reviews

How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness. Seethaler is in his very own league, capturing a place and time that is ultimately universal -- ELIZABETH STROUT
Praise for Robert Seethaler: A Whole Life is a lovely contemplation of a life in solitude in a remote valley, into which the modern world slowly intrudes -- IAN McEWAN
Heart-rending and heartwarming. A Whole Life, for all its gentleness, is a very powerful book -- JIM CRACE
Seethaler's scenes of mountain life are realised with spare, almost surreally vivid images. But what is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric * * Sunday Times * *
A slim masterpiece * * Daily Mail * *
Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility * * Times Literary Supplement * *

Author Bio

Robert Seethaler was born in Vienna in 1966 and is the author of several novels including A Whole Life, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and The Tobacconist, which was a number one German bestseller. Originally published in 2023, Seethaler's novel The Caf with No Name was an instant number one bestseller, spending 55 weeks on the bestseller list. His works have been translated into over 40 languages.

Katy Derbyshire is a Berlin-based translator and writer. She has translated works from Christa Wolf, Inka Parei and Clemens Meyer, most notably translating Meyer's novel Bricks and Mortar, which won the Straelener Prize for Translation and was longlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize.