Over the 29 years of his short life, Franz Michael Felder worked with furious productivity to better himself and the lives of those around him. From his humble origins in the Austrian village of Schoppernau, he went on to found workers' cooperatives, a political party and even a public library in his own home, while also writing many literary works. A Life in the Making is both the culmination of this extraordinary career and a chronicle of its development. It is a story of early hardship and fortitude, of Felder's relentless zeal for learning and his lifelong effort to reconcile his own expanding horizons with the enforced confines of the community he was born to. Unfolding in prose of limpid beauty, A Life in the Making becomes a deeply moving tribute to Felder's wife Nanni, and to his enduring belief in the possibility of a better world.

"A Life in the Making is one of those books exhumed from oblivion that reveal themselves to be blessed with a strange power... The 21st-century reader will never forget this friend from Schoppernau" - Le Matricule des Anges

"One of the masterpieces of 19th-century German literature" - Politis

"This was not the work of an artist thinking up a plot; he wrote as a person directly involved, and that is intensely moving for the reader of these memoirs" - Die Presse am Sontag

"heart-warmingly powerful language" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung