Description

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 loft is her retreat, a place she can draw undisturbed, hidden away even from her own family. But the arrival of the parcel threatens her fragile 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

Publisher Review

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