The Wall

A woman in her forties is spending a few days at a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains when, overnight, an invisible and impenetrable wall seals her off from the rest of the world. Everything beyond it, people and animals alike, appears to have died where it stood. Cut off with only a stray dog, a cat, and a pregnant cow for company, she has to relearn how to live: planting potatoes, cutting hay, hunting, and keeping her small herd through the coming winter.

She keeps a written account of her days on the backs of old calendar pages, unsure whether anyone will ever read it. The record becomes both a survival log and a slow reckoning with the life she left behind, one in which, she writes, she lied to everyone she loved.

Marlen Haushofer wrote the novel three times over, longhand, between 1960 and 1963. Published in German as Die Wand, it is considered her finest work: a spare, unsettling account of isolation, of a woman stripped of the roles that once defined her, and of what is left of a person once civilization is gone. Shaun Whiteside's English translation first appeared in 1990.