The Liquid Land

When her parents die in a car accident, highly talented Austrian physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with a problem. Her parents' will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home - but for strangers, the village of Gross-Einland remains stubbornly hidden from view. When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that exerts a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it - not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy. In the literary tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Raphaela Edelbauer's tale of trauma and history weaves an opaque dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory. The Liquid Land is a dangerous novel, at once glittering nightmare and dark reality, from an extraordinary new voice.

Raphaela Edelbauer was born in Vienna in 1990. She studied Language Art (Sprachkunst) with Robert Schindel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The Liquid Land was published by Klett-Cotta in 2019, and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize and longlisted for the Austrian Book Prize.