A Whole Life

Author: Robert Seethaler

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $30.00 NZD
  • : 9781447283904
  • : Pan Macmillan
  • : Picador
  • :
  • : 0.3
  • : June 2015
  • : 197mm X 130mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 24.99
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Robert Seethaler
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  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : en
  • : 833.92
  • : good-very good
  • :
  • : 160
  • : FA
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Barcode 9781447283904
9781447283904

Description

'Heart-rending and heart-warming ...for all its gentleness, a very powerful novel.' Jim Crace Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven...Like John Williams' Stoner or Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. An exquisite novel about a simple life, it has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of solace and truth. It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are. Translated by Charlotte Collins.

Promotion info

The 200,000-copy German bestseller

Awards

Shortlisted for 2016 Man Booker International

Reviews

Robert Seethaler's quietly mesmerizing novel - elemental in both tone and subject - shows what joy and nobility can be found in a life of hardship, patience and bereavement. It is at once heart-rending and heart-warming. A Whole Life, for all its gentleness, is a very powerful book. -- Jim Crace


Against the backdrop of a literary world that often seems crowded with novels yelling "Look at me!", it's refreshing to read a story marked by quiet, concentrated attention ... Seethaler's scenes of mountain life are realised with spare, almost surreally vivid images. But what is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric. -- Adam Lively Sunday Times


Robert Seethaler's novel is, like its hero, short on words but in its 150 pages manages to do exactly what it says on the tin: embrace a whole life... It's an unremarked existence, told in simple prose, of a simple man that magically captures the universal in all our lives. A slim masterpiece. --Daily Mail


Now another of these special, calm narratives that penetrate the joy and grief, the tiny comforts of being alive and the experiences which shape an individual has arrived ... As haunting and as spare as Stoner. It has been sensitively and astutely translated into English by Charlotte Collins ... a gentle, tender work devoid of sentimentality yet so evocative and moving ... No praise is too high for A Whole Life. Its daunting beauty lingers. This is a profound, wise and humane novel that no reader will forget. -- Eileen Battersby Irish Times


Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility. Times Literary Supplement It takes barely two hours to read it but would take a lifetime to forget. -- Graham Robb


Genuine wisdom and restrained poetry ... Charlotte Collins' translation is a great triumph. --Sunday Telegraph


From its first sentence, Seethaler grips you with a quiet matter-of-factness as he delineates with a suitably spare beauty the life of woodsman Andreas Egger. Independent on Sunday

Author description

Robert Seethaler is an Austrian living in Berlin and is the author of four previous novels. He also works as an actor, most recently in Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza.