Never before in English, Killing Stella is a gripping, razor-sharp novella about a fractured marriage by the ferociously talented author of The Wall.

Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, Anna recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, Anna worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard (who flits from one adultery to another), about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness, and most of all, about Stella, a confused teenager who will meet a sudden and disastrous end.

A domestic horror story that blossoms into a catastrophe, Marlen Haushofer's Killing Stella distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel The Wall into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella.

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness.

Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.