"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide." So begins 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, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as he perceives them. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed not once but over and over again by the miseries of her place and time. Yet well into middle age, living in the Austrian village of her birth, she still remains haunted by her dreams.

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

"No one has been able to dispute the truth of the Nobel's actual citation, of Handke as a writer who "with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience"... Handke's writing also gives words to the voiceless ordeals long considered too mundane for literature" - Financial Times