The Fifth Year is a haunting story of a childhood in the Austrian countryside from the author of The Wall
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In This Spotlight On The Fifth Year
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About The Fifth Year
The Fifth Year follows a five-year-old girl, Marili, through each season of a single year on her grandparents’ farm in the mountains of Austria. Her grandmother is a quiet, melancholic woman; her grandfather, with his calm, cheerful disposition, radiates warmth. Marili’s parents have presumably died in the war, and she is left to discover—with curiosity, wonder, and fear—the beauty and darkness of a quiet pastoral life.
Sinister elements lurk beneath the surface of The Fifth Year, in Marili’s dreams and fantasies, and this deceptively simple tale of childhood, told in effervescent and evocative prose, bubbles to life in Marlen Haushofer’s inimitably alarming style.
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Praise for The Fifth Year
“The mysteries only deepen the further you get in Marlen Haushofer’s…[The Fifth Year] which takes on domestic repression in its many guises.”—Peter C. Baker, The New York Times
“The human capacity to simply keep going lies at the heart of Haushofer’s understanding of the world. What is momentous and beautiful about life, she suggests, is that there is hardly anything we can’t stand; that is its horror, too.”—B.D. McClay, The Wall Street Journal
The Fifth Year is like “A window into the singularity of consciousness.”—Janique Vigier, Bookforum
In The Fifth Year, “Haushofer’s sentences are simple and concise, and full of careful thought.The ideas she expresses are so important that you wonder how you have managed to get by without them.”—Missouri Williams, The Nation
“An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated.”—Elfriede Jelinek
The Fifth Year is “Effortlessly poignant. Haushofer’s prose is like clear lake water: clean, crisp, seemingly simple yet with surprising depths. This novella’s translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait.”—Kirkus (starred)
“Deeply perceptive and sensuous—it’s a stunner. The main event is Haushofer’s painterly depiction of the landscape, as when she describes how the fog lifts as winter approaches.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About Marlen Haushofer, Author of The Fifth Year
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian author of short stories, novels, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has had a strong influence on many German-language writers, such as the Nobel Prize–winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to her. The relaunch of her classic The Wall—acclaimed “strange and wondrous” by James Wood in The New Yorker—was a major literary sensation.
You can discover more about Marlen Haushofer on wikipedia.
Shaun Whiteside is a translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature.
Souce: Publisher
Publisher: New Directions | W.W. Norton
ISBN Paperback 9780811239981
Pub Date May 5, 2026
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