On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House

First edition in English. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 186. Quarter-bound beige cloth over cream white paper boards, lettered in gilt to front and spine. Jacket design by Archie Ferguson.

Translated from the German by Krishna Winston. First published in 1997 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, as In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus.

A poetic exploration of language, longing and dislocation in which a small-town pharmacist with a penchant for wild mushrooms embarks on a summer road trip to Spain. By the controversial Austrian literary giant and founding member of the Grazer Gruppe, alongside Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek and Barbara Frischmuth. Recipient of the 2009 Franz Kafka Prize and the 2014 International Ibsen Award.

The tone-deaf decision of the Nobel Committee to award Handke the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, after a year's hiatus following the fallout from the sexual assault scandal, brought much opprobrium on the Academy itself and aired anew the writer's past comments in support of the Bosnian Serbs and Slobodan Milošević.

"[A] modern-day questing tale in which the grail is never defined or seen, but rather, as the journey unfolds, intuited by both the reader and the hero." –Kai Maristed, The New York Times Book Review