Description

When her cousin and wife fail to return from a walk, this story takes a sinister turn to a quest of survival

A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.

**PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN**

VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit – and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

Publisher Review

It's a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian, an idyll and a nightmare... Every joint and sinew of the story is restless with a sense of threat * London Review of Books * Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. Doris Lessing once remarked that only a woman could have written this novel, and it's true... I've read The Wall three times already and am nowhere near finished -- Nicole Krauss It makes you sick, because, if she wasn't a woman, everyone would be reading it, like Robinson Crusoe -- Sheila Heti, author of 'Motherhood' and 'Pure Colour'