{"title":"Books by Peter Handke","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781250371881","title":"The Second Sword: A Tale from the Merry Month of May, and My Day in the Other Land: A Tale of Demons","description":"The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land are two new novellas by the 2019 Nobel laureate Peter Handke. The first picks up the story where Handke’s last work of fiction, The Fruit Thief (described in The New York Times as “an experience of unadulterated literature”), left off. Here a man has returned to his home in the suburbs of Paris, only to soon set out again. Why? We learn, over the course of a story redolent of Handke’s harrowing A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, that he is seeking to avenge his mother, who has been unjustly denounced in the pages of a newspaper. The Second Sword is a suspenseful work of self-examination: Will the narrator’s journey end in him throwing down the gauntlet?My Day in the Other Land is Handke’s most recently published work - and the first to be written after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Evoking imagery from the Bible and classical mythology, it portrays a man who has been possessed by demons, causing him to rage endlessly against the inhabitants of his rural village. Aided by his sister, he embarks on a journey to a lake on whose opposite shore lies the “other land.” What ensues is an exorcism of sorts - and one of Handke’s most evocative and original endings.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54926193066357,"sku":"9781250371881","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781250371881_ff74e60b-4446-4135-b9aa-435a5fd65914.jpg?v=1786018707"},{"product_id":"9780241457696","title":"The Goalkeeper's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e'Portrays the breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus' \u003ci\u003eThe Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e' \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoseph 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A Kafkaesque crime novel' \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTranslated by Michael Roloff\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56228376117621,"sku":"9780241457696","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241457696_f4e46791-8f09-440c-95ce-c18867afb099.jpg?v=1786012235"},{"product_id":"9780241457672","title":"The Left-Handed Woman","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'One of Europe's great writers' Karl Ove Knausgaard\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTranslated by Ralph Manheim\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56228804428149,"sku":"9780241457672","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241457672_7738c157-700d-4b15-abdc-437a0b100c61.jpg?v=1786012232"},{"product_id":"9780241457689","title":"Repetition","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'\u003ci\u003eRepetition\u003c\/i\u003e made a great and, as I have since learned, lasting impression on me' W. G. Sebald\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFilip 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'One of the most moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth' Gabriel Josipovici\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTranslated by Ralph Manheim\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56229485904245,"sku":"9780241457689","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241457689_9258201f-a6c9-4dad-8395-354d5ce55ad2.jpg?v=1786012233"},{"product_id":"9780857428417","title":"The Great Fall","description":"“On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind.” The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center. He is scheduled to receive a prestigious award that evening from the country’s president, and the following day he is supposed to start shooting for a film—perhaps his last—in which he plays a man who runs amok. While passing through a forest, he encounters the outcasts of the society—homeless people and migrants—but he keeps trudging along, traversing a suburb whose inhabitants are locked in petty but mortal conflicts, crossing a seemingly unbridgeable superhighway, and wandering into an abandoned railyard, where police, unused to pedestrians, detain him briefly on suspicion of terrorism.      Things don’t improve when he reaches the heart of the city. There he can’t help but see the alienation characteristic of its residents and the omnipresent malign influence of electronic technology. What, then, is the “Great Fall”? What is this heart-wrenching, humorous, distinctively attentive narrative trying to tell us? As usual, Peter Handke, deeply introspective and powerfully critical of the world around him, leaves it to the reader to figure out.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311984193909,"sku":"9780857428417","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780857428417_2bda0430-8a46-461a-95df-d655c8a83233.jpg?v=1786015619"},{"product_id":"9780374616151","title":"The Ballad of the Last Guest","description":"Gregor returns home from another continent. The landscape, formerly dotted with small villages, has been absorbed into the outskirts of a large city, both familiar and foreign at the same time. His father sits playing cards, waiting for him, but Gregor is surprised to find his sister holding an infant. He, the older brother, is to be the child’s godfather - though he also carries with him the secret of his younger brother’s death.   In the end, Gregor is never quite able to stay put. He is drawn out into the world, into the streets and alleys of what is now a city, to the cinema, the soccer stadium, the forest, and above all the old fruit orchard, now overgrown and beyond saving. As he walks, the present and the past become intertwined - memories of childhood surface, and inner voices enter into dialogue.   Revisiting many of the settings and themes of Peter Handke’s previous works, The Ballad of the Last Guest takes stock of the changes that have been wrought on the land - and on human beings - over the course of the twenty-first century.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368013803893,"sku":"9780374616151","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780374616151_28466597-1e2b-47e4-a30b-5c4a42fe1d48.jpg?v=1786013807"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-peter-handke.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}