A Whole Life

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2016
The 200,000-copy German bestseller
"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." Irish Times
Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven...
Like John Williams' Stoner or Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, A Whole Life is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. An exquisite novel about a simple life, it has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of solace and truth. It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are.
Translated by Charlotte Collins.
PRAISE FOR A WHOLE LIFE
"Heart-rending and heart-warming . . . for all its gentleness, a very powerful novel." Jim Crace
"Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility." Times Literary Supplement
"What is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric." Sunday Times
"It takes barely two hours to read it but would take a lifetime to forget." Graham Robb
"Genuine wisdom and restrained poetry . . . Charlotte Collins' translation is a great triumph." 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