The Wall

An invisible wall. An empty world. One woman left to discover what survival means when human society disappears. A weekend in the Austrian mountains becomes an inexplicable catastrophe when an unnamed woman finds herself sealed inside a remote valley by a transparent barrier. Beyond it there appears to be no human life. With no rescue coming, she must learn to survive through the seasons, counting supplies, growing food and caring for the animals that become her only companions.

Haushofer transforms the practical details of post-apocalyptic survival in the Austrian Alps into something stranger and more unsettling: a meditation on solitude, grief, animal companionship and humanity's place in nature. The routines that keep the narrator alive also bind her to the vulnerable lives of her pets and livestock , so every loss brings new danger. For readers drawn to literary dystopian fiction, isolation narratives and survival stories with an ecological edge, The Wall sustains a quiet sense of threat while stripping ordinary life back to food, shelter, work, memory and attachment.

The mystery of the barrier remains, but the more disturbing question is what is left of a person when the world that defined her is gone. 'One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best' Susan Choi '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.' Nicole Krauss