Diary of the Fall
  • Published: 1 July 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099581796
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $27.99

Diary of the Fall

Formats & editions
EBook
3 Apr 2014
Paperback
1 Jul 2015
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

A powerful and heartbreaking novel about love, guilt and memory – and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves and each other

‘I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out ... but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed’

A schoolboy prank goes horribly wrong, and a thirteen-year-old boy is left injured. Years later, one of the classmates relives the episode as he tries to come to terms with his demons.

Diary of the Fall is the story of three generations: a man examining the mistakes of his past, and his struggle for forgiveness; a father with Alzheimer’s, for whom recording every memory has become an obsession; and a grandfather who survived Auschwitz, filling notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.

Beautiful and brave, Michel Laub’s novel asks the most basic – and yet most complex – questions about history and identity, exploring what stories we choose to tell about ourselves and how we become the people we are.

Michel Laub's next book, A Poison Apple, will be published on 6th July 2017.
  • Published: 1 July 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099581796
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $27.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Michel Laub

Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre and currently lives in Sao Paulo. He is a writer and journalist, and was named one of Granta's twenty 'Best of Young Brazilian Novelists'. Diary of the Fall, which received the Brasilia Award, was his first novel to appear in English. It won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize 2015 and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2016.

Also by Michel Laub

A Poison Apple
See all

Praise for Diary of the Fall

I have already found a contender for my book of 2014

Nick Barley, Herald

Robustly delicate… This is the Brazilian author’s fifth novel, and the first to be translated into English. Let’s hope for more to follow

Bookseller

This riveting read challenges how we choose to tell others our life story and how events make us into the people we are. A top, quick read

Nimmi Maghera-Rakhra, Sun

A work of immense incantatory power

Neel Mukherjee, Literary Review

Astonishingly powerful ... Diary of a Fall may well emerge as one of the finest novels published in English this year

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

A gripping, thoughtful novel... Laub beautifully retrieves the tragedy of the holocaust from its scholarship, politics and deniers, cutting to the bone of human life, its longings and limitations

Tabish Khair, Independent

A powerful novel

Katie Archer, UK Press Syndication

Utterly convincing... An original and thought-provoking exploration of the way history casts its ripples through generations

Bookmunch

[A] powerful and nuanced novel… Elegantly translated… It is both timely and gratifying to see one of the country’s outstanding writers come to the attention of an English-language readership

Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

The novel succeeds in talking about the horror of horrors because of the illuminating prism through which it is rendered, and because of its compassion, intelligence and respect

Grace McCleen, Independent on Sunday

[A] remarkable novel

Independent on Sunday

A fine, complex piece of writing

New Statesman

Extraordinary... In my world, this novel is already a classic

Karl Ove Knausgaard

A powerful exploration of memory and guilt

Guardian

Laub has crafted a book not only about the power of memory but also about moving on from suffering and taking responsibility for our own actions, and for the people we become

Billy O’Callaghan, Irish Examiner

Laub is trying to create both an incantatory effect and gradually excavate the past; he succeeds brilliantly… A gripping, thoughtful novel, fluidly translated… Laub beautifully retrieves the tragedy of the holocaust from its scholarship, politics and deniers, cutting to the bone of human life, its longings and limitations.

Tabish Khair, Irish Independent