A NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER

A vibrant tale of love, companionship, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.

How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness.--Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.

The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert's café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.

Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.

★ A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

International Bestseller

Winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize

Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award

Longlisted for American Literary Translators Association's Translation Prize in Prose

Andreas Egger knows every path and peak of his mountain valley, the source of his sustenance, his livelihood--his home.

Set in the mid-twentieth century and told with beauty and tenderness, Robert Seethaler's Whole Life is a story of man's relationship with an ancient landscape, of the value of solitude, of the arrival of the modern world, and above all, of the moments, great and small, that make us who we are.

From The Man Booker International Prize finalist Robert Seethaler comes a tender, heartbreaking story of one young man and his friendship with Sigmund Freud during the Nazi occupation of Vienna.

Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz.

As political and social conditions in Austria dramatically worsen with the Nazis' arrival in Vienna, Franz, Freud, and Anezka are swept into the maelstrom of events. Each has a big decision to make: to stay or to flee?

From Robert Seethaler, the International Booker Prize finalist for A Whole Life and bestselling author of The Tobacconist, comes a tale of life and death and human connection, told through the voices of those who have passed on.

The Field is the oldest part of the cemetery in Paulstadt, where some of the small town's most outspoken residents can be found. From their graves, they tell stories. Some recall just a moment -- perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one they now realize changed the course of their life forever. Some remember all the people they've been with, or the only person they ever loved. This chorus of voices -- young, old, rich, poor -- builds a picture of a community, seen from below ground. The streets of the sleepy provincial town are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned, and died there.

The Field is a constellation of human lives -- each one different yet connected to countless others -- that shows how existence, for all its fleetingness, still has profound meaning.

WELCOME TO THE HOTEL POETRY. Ein Hotel, viele Fenster. In jedem Zimmer eine per-sönliche Geschichte, verborgen oder durchs Fenster zu beobachten. Flüchtige Begegnungen oder bleibende Ein-drücke. Hinter jeder Tür ein Mensch mit seinem Leben, seinen Gefühlen, seinen Nöten. Einiges wird sichtbar, aber so manches bleibt geheimnisvoll im Dunkeln. Menschen, so unterschiedlich wie die Autorinnen und Autoren dieser Anthologie, und doch vereint unter dem Dach eines Hotels, versinnbildlicht in diesem Buch. Eine Anthologie zeitgenössischer Poesie. Gedichte, Erzählungen und Gedanken. Mit Robert Seethaler, Daniel Glattauer, Ronja von Rönne, Charles Lewinsky, Clara Maria Bagus, Friedrich Ani, Mirna Funk, Max Küng, Hatice Akyün, Jo Schück, Monika Rinck, Ilma Rakusa, Claas Engels, Katharina Höftmann Ciobo- taru, Thomas Friedmann, Robert Prosser, Simone Lappert, Dan Shambicco, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Michael Fehr, Yari Bernasconi, Fritz Hendrick Melle, Finn Holitzka, Alexander Broicher und Ariadne von Schirach. *Die beiden vorliegenden Editionen sind inhaltsgleich*