An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to Olevano, a small village south-east 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. Written in a rich and poetic style, Grove is an exquisite novel of grief, love and landscapes.
'What makes Grove so noteworthy is the keening, perfectly weighted clarity of Esther Kinsky's prose; Caroline Schmidt's elegantly considered translation is meticulous but never overstated.'
- Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
'This is a sublime book, born of profound, empathetic understanding.'
- Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times
'The language and atmosphere is again redolent of Kinsky's compatriot W. G. Sebald, the much-missed psychogeographer. With Grove, she has reached his level. This is a book that finds a kind of comfort in the transience of being human.'
- i
'Depth of detail is Kinsky's forte, her language tailored perfectly to a natural world inherent with life and a mystical beauty.'
- Review 31
'[This] remarkable novel...demonstrate[s] that the many turns and returns of memory can become part of a path to be on-that, in other words, it is possible to move ahead precisely by circling back, to learn how to sow by remembering how to bury, and vice versa...'
- Alexander Sorenson, Los Angeles Review of Books
'Grove is a realistic and humbling exploration of the all-encompassing nature of bereavement. Kinsky paints a striking picture, aided by Caroline Schmidt's careful translation.'
- Lunate
'Deeply sad and darkly beautiful. The novel is masterly and uplifting and without any doubt it offers solace.'
- Jury for the Dusseldorf Literature Prize
'A recently bereaved woman decides to go on a trip to a small town in Italy. She wanders around describing her surroundings and the people she meets in an intimate tone that hovers between the banal and the sublime. A novel set to the pace of the narrator's walks, it is an exploration on the effects of grief and the sometimes puzzling ways it manifests itself.'
- Buenos Aires Herald
Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, four novels (Summer Resort, Banatsko, River, Grove) numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children's books. She has translated many notable English (John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, Iain Sinclair) and Polish (Joanna Bator, Miron Bialoszewski, Magdalena Tulli) authors into German. Both River and Grove won numerous literary prizes in Germany.