Anglický jazyk

Last House Before the Mountain

Vydavateľstvo: Bloomsbury UK
Rok vydania: 2023
Formát: Paperback
Rozmer: 214 x 134 mm
Jazyk: Anglický jazyk
ISBN: 9781526658807

Na objednávku

16.81 €

bežná cena: 19.10 €

O knihe

For readers of Ian McEwan and Julie Orringer, a spellbinding, multigenerational family saga set in a fractured rural village in WWI Austria.

Josef and Maria live with their children on the edge of a valley in westernmost Austria, far away from the local residents, who scorn the family's aura of separateness and ill-repute, though no one can quite pinpoint the source of the grudge. Perhaps it's the poverty of "the Pack," as they are known, or their cheap, outlying land where the mountains begin to rise up. Perhaps it's Maria's unseemly beauty, her dark hair and clean white clothes, her rugged husband's stern, illegible face. Perhaps it's their baseless pride; even the children of "the Pack" seem God-forsaken yet impervious, needing no one outside their tribe.

At the start of WWI, Josef is drafted into the army for what he expects to be a short time, leaving Maria and the children dependent on the protection of the village's self-aggrandizing, lascivious mayor. While her husband is gone, Maria falls in love with a red-haired stranger from Hanover and becomes pregnant with Margarethe (Grete), her fifth child. Born upon her husband's return, Josef will never speak a word to her. And she will grow up to be the author's mother.

Based on celebrated Austrian novelist Monika Helfer's own family history through the Twentieth Century, and following with breathtaking grace the inherited trauma of four generations, Last House Before the Mountain is a propulsive, haunting, multilayered saga about memory, family, and the hidden wages of war.