The Wall

By Marlen Haushofer

Recommended by Chris

“A softly heart-wrenching account of one woman’s survival when she finds herself trapped inside an invisible wall in the middle of the Austrian Alps. With only animals in her new world, she grapples with caretaking and her own loneliness in probably the most (post)human novel l’ve ever read.”

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.

Pushkin, 2022