The Wall

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 KraussIt 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 JelinekThe 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 LessingWhat is the wall? An allusion to the Cold War? An allegory for the Berlin Wall? Yes. But it also serves as a metaphorical stand-in for so many restrictions. It creates a situation that allows the main character and the reader to examine our ontology and what we think makes us real * Kirkus Reviews (starred) *The Wall is speculative fiction of a distinctly existential sort, where the subject being speculated on is not what happened to the world, but what happens to reality when society is stripped away…Nothing resolves, yet the book is constantly resonating * Wall Street Journal *Brutal and absorbing… But The Wall is also a resonant and realistic account of a widowed, middle-aged woman, disenchanted and depressed with the sum of her days, who is presented with the opportunity to enact what has previously eluded her: a life of her own imagining. In this way, Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century * The Atlantic *

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 Jähner, To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski, Berlin Finale by Heinz Rein and The Broken House by Horst Krüger.