"MY MOTHER has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away ..." So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life. What emerges is a loving portrait of inconsolable grief, a woman whose lively spirit has been crushed by the miseries of her place and time.

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PETER HANDKE, dramatist, novelist, poet, essayist and writer of screenplays, was born in Griffen, Austria in 1942. Handke has been awarded many literary prizes, including the Schiller Prize in 1972 and the Kafka Prize in 1979, which he turned down. He now lives and works in Paris.

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TRANSLATED BY Ralph Manheim
Cover illustration by Massimo Kaufmann
ISBN 1-901285-17-0 • 80pp • £8