Set in 1960, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's Repetition narrates Filip Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his brother Gregor, who disappeared in the region after deserting from the German army and joining the Partisans. He takes with him two books that had belonged to Gregor: a copybook from agricultural college, which mainly concerns the care and grafting of fruit trees, and a Slovene-German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2019

'One of the best and most important books written in German in our time' Karl Ove Knausgaard

'A devastating sliver of a book' Maggie Nelson

'Moving and beautifully realized... nearly perfect' New York Times Book Review

'Handke's sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty' Jeffrey Eugenides

This is Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, the eminent Austrian novelist and playwright sets out to piece together the facts of her life. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, and of a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. In stark, lucid prose, Handke reckons with his mother's life as it spans the rise of fascism, World War Two and post-war suffering.

A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke--one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original works On a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Metro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters--with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who abandons his scooter to become a fellow traveler for a day--are like so many throws of the dice, each exposing new facets of this mysterious individual in the manner of a cubist portrait. In prose of unrivaled precision, lucidly rendered into English by Krishna Winston, The Fruit Thief elevates the terrain of everyday life to epic status, and situates the microgeography of an individual at the center of a book like few others. This is one of Nobel laureate Peter Handke's most significant and original achievements.

"The Sunday edition of the "Karntner Volkszeitung "carried the following item under 'Local News' 'In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.'"

So opens "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, "the eminent Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke's reckoning with his mother's life--which spanned the rise of the Nazis, World War II, and postwar suffering--and death. Both stark and lyrical, full of love, anger, admiration, and a keen sense of history, this slim book reveals Handke at his most lucid and direct. It is the most moving and accessible work in his distinguished career; it is "indispensable" (Bill Marx, "The Boston Globe").

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 'Repetition made a great and, as I have since learned, lasting impression on me' W. G. Sebald Filip Kobal, an Austrian teenager, is on the trail of his missing older brother Gregor, who he never knew. All he has is two of Gregor's books: a school copy book, and a dictionary in which certain words have been marked. As he enters Slovenia on his journey, Filip discovers something else entirely: the transformative power of language to describe the world, and the unnerving joy of being an outsider in a strange land. 'One of the most moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth' Gabriel Josipovici Translated by Ralph Manheim

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 'Portrays the breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus' The Stranger' The New York Times Joseph Bloch, a once-famous goalkeeper turned construction worker, commits a random murder without thought or regret. As he wanders the streets, from hotel to bar, cinema to tram stop, experiencing strange and violent encounters on the way, he finds himself, and everything around him, disintegrating. Told in spare and icy prose, Peter Handke's masterpiece of alienation takes apart our ideas of humanity and reality itself. 'A Kafkaesque crime novel' Los Angeles Times Translated by Michael Roloff

"Short Letter, Long Farewell" is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke's novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who has just arrived in America, where he hopes to get over the collapse of his marriage. No sooner has he arrived, however, than he discovers that his ex-wife is pursuing him. He flees, she follows, and soon the couple is running circles around each other across the length of America--from Philadelphia to St. Louis to the Arizona desert, and from Portland, Oregon, to L.A. Is it love or vengeance that they want from each other? Everything's spectacularly unclear in a book that is travelogue, suspense story, domestic comedy, and Western showdown, with a totally unexpected Hollywood twist at the end. Above all, "Short Letter, Long Farewell" is a love letter to America, its landscapes and popular culture, the invitation and the threat of its newness and wildness and emptiness, with the promise of a new life--or the corpse of an old one--lying just around the corner.

Peter Handke's work is amongst the most strikingly original of all post-war European writing (Times Educational Supplement) Offending the Audience is "a dissection of our expectations about what ought to happen in the theatre." Self-Accusation is "a cunning and ironic attack on bureaucratic moral guilt" (Observer); Kaspar is based on the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a sixteen year old boy who appeared from nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828 and who had to be taught to speak from scratch. Handke's play is a downright attack on the way language is used by a corrupt society to depersonalise the individual; My Foot My Tutor is a mime for two actors - "Handke has here written an hour-long play without words that may at first look like a piece of audience-provocation but that finishes up as sheer theatrical poetry" (Guardian). In The Ride across Lake Constance, a group of characters (known only by the names of the actors who perform the parts) talk and play games together and skate over the thin ice that separates them from unspoken danger. "Intensely theatrical...an author for whom playwriting seems akin to tightrope walking" (The Times). They Are Dying Out puts the pillars of the bourgeoisie under the microscope to reveal an alien race, suffocated by rationality, unable to cope with untamed subjective impulses and shows an "uncanny knack for making the familiar seem strange" (Plays and Players).

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 'One of Europe's great writers' Karl Ove Knausgaard One evening Marianne, a suburban housewife living in an identikit bungalow, is struck by the realization that her husband will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. So she sends him away, knowing she must fend for herself and her young son. As she adjusts to her disorienting new life alone, what she thought was fear slowly starts to feel like freedom. 'Knifelike clarity of evocation ... Handke is a kind of nature poet, a romantic whose exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy to the landscape' John Updike Translated by Ralph Manheim

The first of Peter Handke's novels to be published in English, "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick "is a true modern classic that "portrays the...breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus's "The Stranger"" (Richard Locke, "The New York Times). "The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by his use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys "at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world" (Bill Marx, "Boston Sunday Globe). "