The Wall
Marlen Haushofer author Shaun Whiteside translator Claire-Louise Bennett editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:7th Jul '22
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£9.99(9781784879976)

The strange and suspenseful dystopian classic about an ordinary woman whose weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.
**FOR FANS OF I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN**
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
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.
One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best -- Susan Choi
A brutal and absorbing dystopian novel... Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century * The Atlantic *
The Wall is an existentialist masterpiece that can offer profound consolation as well as the ultimate lesson in loss -- Michel Faber
Totally gripping -- Daniel Swift * Spectator, *Books of the Year* *
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'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 *
The Wall is a dystopian novel that gradually becomes a utopian one, as our narrator makes a new community... a feminist rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe * New Yorker *
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'
An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated -- Elfriede Jelinek
The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine's loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy -- Doris Lessing
ISBN: 9781784878030
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 15mm
Weight: 184g
256 pages