The Wall

The Wall is a cult classic, the ultimate work of sustained dread—a story of a woman trapped alone in the forest.

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

During her holiday in the Austrian mountains, a woman spends a few days with her cousin and his wife at their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, she sets off to look for them. Her journey, however, reaches a mysterious dead end when she discovers a transparent wall, behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind this wall, she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, hoping for a calf, counting matches, forgetting the taste of sugar, and the use of one's name. Simultaneously, it offers 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