book cover of Killing Stella
 

Killing Stella

(1958)
A Story by

 
 
Never before in English, a gripping, razor-sharp novella of a fractured marriage, by the ferociously talented author of THE WALL


Main description: Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, the narrator of KILLING STELLA recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, she worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to another, about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness to everything, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end.


A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, KILLING STELLA distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel THE WALL into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella. 


Genre: Literary Fiction

Praise for this book

"Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. I know of no closer study in claustrophobia and liberation, and of an independence whose severity is at once ecstatic and doomed." - Nicole Krauss

"It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine's loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy." - Doris Lessing


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