The Café with No Name
Robert Seethaler
Available as Hardback
The international bestselling author of A Whole Life and The Tobacconist returns with a captivating historical tale set in 1960s Vienna
THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
‘How I loved this book … Seethaler is in his very own league’ Elizabeth Strout
It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert’s dream.
A story of the hopes, kindnesses and everyday heroism of one community, The Café with No Name has charmed millions of European readers. It is an unforgettable novel about how we carry each other through good and bad times, and how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.
“How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness. Seethaler is in his very own league, capturing a place and time that is ultimately universal”
Elizabeth Strout
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“[A] moving, charming novel about to what extent we must change as the world around us hurtles into the unknown”
Ellen Peirson-hagger
the Observer
“Rewarding … written with an understated and elegant restraint that is no less poignant and powerful for it”
Tan Twan Eng
“In common with Seethaler’s earlier work, this is a pensive novel, written with sensitivity and compassion … Seethaler’s subtly understated voice remains warmly welcome in a literary culture that often displays its intentions too obviously. Many will love this calming, gentle and unsentimental story. Certainly, Seethaler remains admirably true to his creative vision. A poet of the small, the random and the event without consequence, his is a world we can all enjoy”
guardian
“Seethaler’s literary preoccupations [can be placed] alongside writers such as Claire Keegan, John Berger or John Williams … Modest ambitions, when precisely executed, make lasting impressions … his latest fable-like miniature invites quiet wonder into the ordinary”
financial Times
Robert Seethaler
Robert Seethaler was born in Vienna in 1966 and is the author of several novels including A Whole Life, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and The Tobacconist, which was a number one German bestseller. Originally published in 2023, Seethaler’s novel The Café with No Name was an instant number one bestseller, spending 44 weeks on the bestseller list. His works have been translated into over 40 languages.
Katy Derbyshire is a Berlin-based translator. She has translated works by Christa Wolf, Inka Parei and Clemens Meyer, most notably Meyer’s novel Bricks and Mortar, which won the Straelener Prize for Translation. Meyer and Derbyshire have twice been longlisted for the International Booker Prize.