A riveting non-fiction book by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.
Published just before the centenary year of one of the German-speaking world's most extraordinary post-war writers, Tom McCarthy's short book unpacks a single poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. Latching onto two of its central terms—the eponymous threshold and ledger—McCarthy takes off on a line of flight that carries the reader through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926—1973) may have spent her career in shadow of her lover Paul Celan; but since her untimely death her star has outshone even his. In recent years more and more Anglophone writers and readers have been switching on to her importance. Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.
