The Left-Handed Woman

The Left-Handed Woman

Summary

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

'One of Europe's great writers' Karl Ove Knausgaard


One evening Marianne, a suburban housewife living in an identikit bungalow, is struck by the realization that her husband will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. So she sends him away, knowing she must fend for herself and her young son. As she adjusts to her disorienting new life alone, what she thought was fear slowly starts to feel like freedom.

'Knifelike clarity of evocation ... Handke is a kind of nature poet, a romantic whose exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy to the landscape' John Updike

Translated by Ralph Manheim

Reviews

  • Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde, denouncing all social, psychological and historical categories of experience as species of linguistic fraud. But [he] has aged well and now...is regarded as one of the most important writers in German
    Richard Locke, The New York Times

About the author

Peter Handke

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. A novelist, playwright and translator, he is the author of such acclaimed works as The Moravian Night, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Repetition. The recipient of multiple literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award, Handke is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed adaptations of his novels The Left-Handed Woman and Absence, and co-wrote the screenplays for Wim Wenders' Wrong Movie and Wings of Desire. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.
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