Description

Andreas Egger knows every path and peak of his mountain valley, the source of his sustenance, his livelihood – his home.

Set in the mid-twentieth century and told with beauty and tenderness, Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life is a story of man’s relationship with an ancient landscape, of the value of solitude, of the arrival of the modern world, and above all, of the moments, great and small, that make us who we are.

Publisher Review

A lovely contemplation of a life in solitude in a remote valley, into which the modern world slowly intrudes — IAN McEWAN Deeply moving * * Sunday Times * * Magically captures the universal in all our lives. A slim masterpiece * * Daily Mail * * As haunting and as spare as Stoner. . . 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 * * 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 — JIM CRACE Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility * * Times Literary Supplement * * Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility * * 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 * * A perfect, warm, moving antidote to, well, pretty much everything that’s going on in the world . . . beautifully rendered by the book’s translator Charlotte Collins * * New European * * A Whole Life is a provocatively ambitious title for this spare, novella-length work . . . Flecked with profundity [and] dark humour * * New York Times * *