A lovely contemplation of a life in solitude in a remote valley, into which the modern world slowly intrudes -- IAN McEWAN Deeply moving * * Sunday Times * * Magically captures the universal in all our lives. A slim masterpiece * * Daily Mail * * As haunting and as spare as Stoner. . . No praise is too high for A Whole Life. Its daunting beauty lingers. This is a profound, wise and humane novel that no reader will forget -- EILEEN BATTERSBY * * Irish Times * * Robert Seethaler's quietly mesmerizing novel - elemental in both tone and subject - shows what joy and nobility can be found in a life of hardship, patience and bereavement. It is at once heart-rending and heart-warming -- JIM CRACE Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility * * Times Literary Supplement * * Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility * * Sunday Telegraph * * From its first sentence, Seethaler grips you with a quiet matter-of-factness as he delineates with a suitably spare beauty the life of woodsman Andreas Egger * * Independent on Sunday * * A perfect, warm, moving antidote to, well, pretty much everything that's going on in the world . . . beautifully rendered by the book's translator Charlotte Collins * * New European * * A Whole Life is a provocatively ambitious title for this spare, novella-length work . . . Flecked with profundity [ and] dark humour * * New York Times * *