Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2020
287 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to a small village southeast of Rome.
It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it. In Kinsky's Grove, winner of the 2018 Leipzig Book Prize, grief must bear the weight of the world and full of grief the narrator becomes one with the brittle manifestations of the Italian winter.
"[E]xquisite...Kinsky is a photographer's novelist; her prose unravels like a roll of film as visual meditation. The true beauty of this work emerges with patience and contemplation." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Poetic and painterly...A philosophical jewel seeking revelation in interstices, absences, ruptures, and the passages between existence and memory." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Grove is a story of an existence stilled by loss, but the promise of life, and with it renewal and hope, pulses gently but steadily at its heart." - Lucy Scholes, Financial Times (UK)
"[Esther Kinsky] has an endless amount of words and expressions, an almost eerily differentiated vocabulary for the fallows, marshland, groves, woods, for that botanical-geological in-between, which is also an in-between of meaning...This much absence in the presence of words is rare, and it makes for great art." - Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
This information about Grove was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of three volumes of poetry and two novels, including River, and has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Lewis Grassic Gibbon) and Polish (Miron Białoszewski, Zygmunt Haupt, Ida Fink, Olga Tokarczuk) authors into German. Grove is the winner of the 2018 Leipzig Book Prize.
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