The Wall - Marlen Haushofer;Shaun Whiteside

A woman''s weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival.

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.

''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, author of The History of Love

TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE