Monika Helfer - Böcker

‘Beautiful and heartbreaking ... I absolutely loved it’ MONICA ALI‘A poignant, captivating, beautifully woven family saga. As honest as Elena Ferrante, with the folkloric intensity of Téa Obreht’ CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE‘The final moving paragraph strikes the reader like a knife to the heart’ OBSERVERMaria and Josef live with their children in a valley in westernmost Austria. When the First World War breaks out and Josef is drafted into the army, Maria is left to provide for her family alone. Every day is a struggle against starvation, the harsh alpine climate and the hostile nearby villagers who see Maria as little more than a beautiful temptress out for the men left behind. But when a red-haired stranger arrives in the village, Maria feels happiness seep back into her life and she faces a choice whose consequences will affect the lives of her family for generations to come.Based on the internationally bestselling and award-winning Austrian novelist Monika Helfer's own family history, Last House Before the Mountain is a propulsive, haunting, multi-layered saga about love, family, and the hidden wages of war.Maria and Josef live with their children in a valley in westernmost Austria. When the First World War breaks out and Josef is drafted into the army, Maria is left to provide for her family alone. Every day is a struggle against starvation, the harsh alpine climate and the hostile nearby villagers who see Maria as little more than a beautiful temptress out to seduce the men left behind. But when a red-haired stranger arrives in the village, Maria feels happiness seep back into her life and she faces a choice, with consequences that will affect the lives of her family for generations to come.Based on the award-winning Austrian novelist’s own family history, this is a propulsive, haunting story about love, family and the hidden wages of war.‘A masterclass in literary compression. Helfer brings a whole world of wonder, loss and deep, deep longing to indelible life’ LAIRD HUNT

From Monika Helfer’s award-winning, internationally bestselling wartime trilogy, based on her own family. Translated into English for the first time.‘We called him Vati, Dad. Not Father, not Papa. That’s what he wanted. He thought it sounded modern. He wanted to present himself to us, and through us, as a man in tune with the modern age. Though he seemed to come from nowhere.’Josef was an illegitimate child, a charity case from Salzburg, schooled by a benefactor. He was drafted to fight in the Second World War while still at school and sent to Russia, returning with only one leg. He married his nurse, and brought his family to the high, idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps, where he took a position as manager of a home for injured soldiers, a strangely suspended, deeply isolated place with a remarkable library.He was a man of many mysteries. To his daughter, Monika, none was greater than his obsession with these cloistered, crumbling books, his great treasure and secret amidst a country barrelling away from the memory of war.Beautifully written, restrained, and memorable, Library for the War-Wounded turns a real life into great literature by confronting the universal question: Who are our parents, really?