The Loft

An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. Then one day a disturbing package arrives in the post... 
 
The narrator of this story spends her free time in her loft. It is a retreat where she can draw undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery. 
 
The arrival of the parcel threatens her quiet equilibrium. It contains extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. They date back to a time when she was sent away by her husband to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest? 
 
'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can’ John Self, Guardian 
 
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA

Her prose is a model of simplicity and concision; but the pictures which her sentences paint are enigmatic, overdetermined, elusive. We can claim her books for feminism, for eco-politics, for existentialism or psychoanalysis, or we can take them as thrillers or dreams

It is the skilful juxtaposition of internal loneliness and isolation with…[a] mysterious, chilling past that brings such emotional power to this unusual book

Marlen Haushofer (Author) 
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1950) was born in Frauenstein, Austria, the daughter of a forester. After the Second World War, she worked in her husband’s dentistry practice and had two children, but before long she began publishing short stories in magazines. She lived something of a double life, splitting her time between being a quiet, traditional housewife in Steyr, and a writer in fashionable literary circles in Vienna. Her most enduring work was The Wall, first published in 1963, and now considered a classic of dystopian fiction.

An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. 
 
The loft is a retreat where she can work undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery. 
 
Then one day, a package arrives containing extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. Back then she had been sent away to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages containing old diary entries arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest? 
 
'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can’ John Self, Guardian 
 
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA

Killing Stella

A book that gets more, not less, mysterious as it goes. I am glad that such novels exist; they are the literary equivalent of a sudden plunge into icy waters. They shock, they clarify

Killing Stella has much in common with the claustrophobic-yet-idyllic milieu of the HBO White Lotus series or Patricia Smith's Ripley novels

A slim domestic horror story that serves as a perfect entry to Haushofer’s work

Haushofer brilliantly transforms an inevitable fatal ending into an electrifying beginning... Stella remains timelessly potent, its haunting horror more relevant than ever

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.

Claustrophobic and shattering, this is the story of one ordinary woman unable to save a teenager in her care. It is the story of Stella... 
 
Stella is a friend's nineteen-year-old daughter who has come to live with Anna and her family. Unloved and neglected, Stella's presence disturbs the already tense and tumultuous household. She lodges uncomfortably in their lives, whilst Anna struggles to bring warmth and welcome to the home. Her son continues to be gloomy and her daughter oblivious. Meanwhile Richard, Anna's adulterous husband, pretends not to notice Stella at all… 
 
Marlen Haushofer, author of The Wall, is the undisputed mistress of sustained dread and this gripping short novel deserves to be rediscovered. 
 
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE 
 
'This potent 1958 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer takes the form of a mother’s agitated confession... This one hits hard' Publisher's Weekly 
 
'Chillingly unillusioned... A fable about the habitual moral inertia of educated people' London Review of Books 
 
‘Haushofer is a rather terrifying writer… Killing Stella limns a world of guilty secrets and repressions’ New Yorker

Marlen Haushofer

Shaun Whiteside

Claire-Louise Bennett

One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best

A brutal and absorbing dystopian novel... Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century

The Wall is an existentialist masterpiece that can offer profound consolation as well as the ultimate lesson in loss

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

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

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

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

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

What 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

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

A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT 
 
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

Marlen Haushofer

Praise for The Wall

One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best

A brutal and absorbing dystopian novel... Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century

The Wall is an existentialist masterpiece that can offer profound consolation as well as the ultimate lesson in loss

One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best

A brutal and absorbing dystopian novel... Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century

The Wall is an existentialist masterpiece that can offer profound consolation as well as the ultimate lesson in loss

One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best

A brutal and absorbing dystopian novel... Haushofer’s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century

The Wall is an existentialist masterpiece that can offer profound consolation as well as the ultimate lesson in loss

Books by Marlen Haushofer

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