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

One of 2019 Nobel Laureate for Literature's most important works, a spare and haunting novel of alienation.

About the Author
Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942. A novelist, playwright and translator, he is the author of such acclaimed works as The Moravian Night, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Repetition. The recipient of multiple literary awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award, Handke is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed adaptations of his novels The Left-Handed Woman and Absence, and co-wrote the screenplays for Wim Wenders' Wrong Movie and Wings of Desire. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

Reviews
A seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world * Boston Sunday Globe *
Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde, denouncing all social, psychological and historical categories of experience as species of linguistic fraud. But [he] has aged well and now...is regarded as one of the most important writers in German -- Richard Locke * The New York Times *
One of Europe's great writers -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
The author reports and meditates upon the silent catastrophes that continuously befall the human interior -- WG Sebald



Book Information
ISBN 9780241457696
Author Peter Handke
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 60g
Dimensions(mm) 194mm * 128mm * 12mm