Description

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

‘Portrays the breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus’ The Stranger’ The New York Times

Joseph Bloch, a once-famous goalkeeper turned construction worker, commits a random murder without thought or regret. As he wanders the streets, from hotel to bar, cinema to tram stop, experiencing strange and violent encounters on the way, he finds himself, and everything around him, disintegrating. Told in spare and icy prose, Peter Handke’s masterpiece of alienation takes apart our ideas of humanity and reality itself.

‘A Kafkaesque crime novel’ Los Angeles Times

Translated by Michael Roloff

Publisher Review

A seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world * Boston Sunday Globe * 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 * One of Europe's great writers -- Karl Ove Knausgaard The author reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior -- WG Sebald