A strange, melancholy, snow-covered rail novel about memory, Central Europe, empire, ruins, old maps and unfinished histories.

We follow one elderly man trying to travel backwards through a world that no longer exists. Jan Kraus works as a palliative nurse in Berlin, helping the dying make their exits; then he meets Wenzel Winterberg, an almost-centenarian Czech-German man with a Baedeker guide to Austria-Hungary from 1913 and a head full of ghosts.

The two set off by train across the old imperial routes: from Berlin through the Czech lands, Vienna, Budapest, Sarajevo, and the graveyards of the twentieth century. Winterberg talks and talks — about lost towns, vanished borders, battles, cemeteries, beer, schnapps, railway stations, dead women, dead empires, dead languages — while Kraus listens, translates, resists, and slowly gets pulled into the undertow. 

A very good one for readers of W. G. Sebald, László Krasznahorkai, Bohumil Hrabal, Olga Tokarczuk, Joseph Roth, train literature, memory novels, European borderlands, and fiction that understands history as something less like a timeline and more like rising damp. 

First English-language edition paperback published by Jantar Publishing in 2024, translated from the German by Kris Best. As new.