The Wall: Discover this addictive dystopia from the Vintage Earth series

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

VINTAGE EARTH- A series of transformative novels with the environment at their heart. 'The air trembled, gold and green and clear, at the edges of the forest' A woman goes to the Austrian mountains to spend a few days in a hunting lodge with her cousin and his wife. When the couple fail to return from a walk, the woman tries to go into the village to look for them. Instead she comes across a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped behind the wall, a result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the arduous work of not only survival but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple document 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 meditation on our place in the natural world. VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

Reviews

It's a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian, an idyll and a nightmare... 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. Doris Lessing once remarked that only a woman could have written this novel, and it's true... I've read The Wall three times already and am nowhere near finished -- Nicole Krauss
It makes you sick, because, if she wasn't a woman, everyone would be reading it, like Robinson Crusoe -- Sheila Heti, author of 'Motherhood' and 'Pure Colour'
Totally gripping -- Daniel Swift * Spectator, *Books of the Year* *
An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated -- Elfriede Jelinek

Author Bio

Marlen Haushofer (Author)
Marie Helene Haushofer was born in Frauenstein, Austria in 1920. Following the Second World War, she worked in her husband's dentistry practice. She began publishing short stories in magazines from 1946. She enjoyed success with her novella The Fifth Year, which was published in 1952 but her most enduring work was The Wall, first published in 1963 and now considered a classic of dystopian fiction. She died in 1970.

Shaun Whiteside (Translator)
Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from French, German, Italian and Dutch. His most recent translations from German include Aftermath by Harald Jhner, To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski, Berlin Finale by Heinz Rein and The Broken House by Horst Krger.