Extinction

'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' - Lucy Ellmann (author of the 2019 Booker Prize-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport).

LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY GEOFF DYER

'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ...

LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY GEOFF DYER

'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann

'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove Knausgaard

Franz-Josef Murau is the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family. He now lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg: and he must decide its fate.

The summit of Thomas Bernhard's artistic genius - mesmerising, addictive, explosively tragicomic - Extinction is a landmark of post-war literature, newly illuminated by Geoff Dyer's afterword.