About the Author

Marlen Haushofer (Author)
Marie Helene Haushofer was born in Frauenstein, Austria in 1920. Following the Second World War, she worked in her husband's dentistry practice. She began publishing short stories in magazines from 1946. She enjoyed success with her novella The Fifth Year, which was published in 1952 but her most enduring work was The Wall, first published in 1963 and now considered a classic of dystopian fiction. She died in 1970.

Shaun Whiteside (Translator)
Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from French, German, Italian and Dutch. His most recent translations from German include Aftermath by Harald Jähner, To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann, Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski, Berlin Finale by Heinz Rein and The Broken House by Horst Krüger.

Reviews

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'*

Totally gripping
*Spectator, *Books of the Year**

An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated
*Elfriede Jelinek*