A woman is unnerved when a sinister package arrives in the post - containing her old diary entries. Strange and gripping, this is the unmistakable work of Marlen Haushofer, mistress of sustained dread and author of the cult classic, The Wall. An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. The loft is a retreat where she can work undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery. Then one day, a package arrives containing extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. Back then she had been sent away to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages containing old diary entries arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest? 'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can' John Self, Guardian TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA

Details

ISBN13: 9781529953473
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 240
Edition:
Publication Date: 07 Oct 2025
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 20(H)x15.8(L)x2.8(W)306
Weight (gm): 306

Author Biography

Marlen Haushofer (Author) Marlen Haushofer (1920-1950) was born in Frauenstein, Austria, the daughter of a forester. After the Second World War, she worked in her husband's dentistry practice and had two children, but before long she began publishing short stories in magazines. She lived something of a double life, splitting her time between being a quiet, traditional housewife in Steyr, and a writer in fashionable literary circles in Vienna. Her most enduring work was The Wall, first published in 1963, and now considered a classic of dystopian fiction.

Reviews

Her prose is a model of simplicity and concision; but the pictures which her sentences paint are enigmatic, overdetermined, elusive. We can claim her books for feminism, for eco-politics, for existentialism or psychoanalysis, or we can take them as thrillers or dreams * London Review of Books *
It is the skilful juxtaposition of internal loneliness and isolation with…[a] mysterious, chilling past that brings such emotional power to this unusual book * Daily Mail *