You Should Have Left: A Novel

Now a Major Motion PictureFrom the internationally bestselling author of Measuring the World and F, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapseA screenwriter, his wife, and their four-year old daughter rent a house in the mountains of Germany, but something isn’t right. As he toils on a sequel to his most successful movie, the screenwriter notices that rooms aren’t where he remembers them—and finds in his notebook words that are not his own.

The New York Times Book Review

“Mind-bending. . . . Part horror, part science fiction.”

Monocle

“A book that should carry a health warning: read alone at your own risk.”

Entertainment Weekly

“Riveting.”

Harper’s Magazine

“Clever, exquisitely terrifying. . . . [Kehlmann] makes entertainment out of metaphysics.”

The Literary Review

“A masterclass in economical storytelling, meticulously attentive prose and imaginative agility. Kehlmann creates narrative complexity with the deftest of strokes.”

The Times Literary Supplement

“[A] master novelist. . . . [Kehlmann] has a rare ability to make complex ideas the stuff of warm, light fiction.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A beautifully crafted exercise in terror. . . . [Kehlmann] creates a sense of existential dread that transcends the typical ghost story. . . . A book to keep you up at night.”

its effects are amplified, and they linger.”

“[Kehlmann] is in total control. . . . He and his translator Ross Benjamin squeeze an enormous amount of readerly anxiety out of very few carefully placed words. . . . This is a story about a marriage in trouble, and about a seemingly impossible desire to protect a young child from threatening reality, but also about something else, something unavoidable and powerful but terrifyingly vague. . . . This little book . . . has a funny way with dimensions

The Brooklyn Rail

“A masterful experiment about the limits of literary realism.”

The Irish Times

“Wry, eerie and increasingly terrifying. . . . Kehlmann is a formidable observer with a flair for articulating dysfunctional behaviour. . . . An entertaining Everyman’s postmodernist Gothic guaranteed to unsettle.”

and a delightful take on the writing life.”

“A quick, fun, breathless read. It’s inventive and scary

Publishers Weekly

“Chilling. . . . Kehlmann makes deft use of horror staples and offers commentary on the distinction between art and life.”

The Sunday Times (London)

“A taut and scary novella.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I don’t understand why I had a dream like that after such a blissful evening. An empty room. A naked lightbulb on the ceiling, in the corner a chair with only three legs, one of them broken off. The door was locked; what was I afraid of? The woman. Her narrow eyes were very close together, on either side of the root of her nose, which had a deep wrinkle down the middle. Her forehead too was wrinkled, and her lips were slightly open, so that I could see her teeth, yellowish like those of heavy smokers. But it was her eyes that were awful.  She stood there while my fear grew unbearable. I was trembling, I had difficulty breathing, my eyes were watering, my legs went weak—this didn’t actually happen to my real body, of course, so is it possible that I wasn’t afraid at all, that it was only my dream self, just as only my dream hands were trembling? No, the fear was as real as fear can be, and burned in me, and when it was no longer tolerable, the woman took a step back, as if she were releasing me, and only then was I back in our bedroom, where I heard Susanna’s steady breathing and saw the moonlight falling softly through the window, and the baby monitor showed our daughter in a deep sleep.  Breakfast: Bright grass and even brighter sun, no clouds, the air full of birds whose names I don’t know; I’ve always regretted that I can’t identify birds by name. The way they let the wind carry them, as effortlessly as if flying were the norm, as if it took hard work to stay on the ground. At the moment Susanna is reading to Esther for the thousandth time from the book about the mouse and the cheese moon, the little one is laughing and clapping, and I’m quickly finishing my writing before I head out. We’re running low on provisions, someone has to go down to the village, and I volunteered. Get away. Susanna said thank you and held my hand, and I looked into her eyes. They’re not actually blue, more turquoise, with a sprinkling of black.  Will you read me your new scenes?You don’t really want me to. Don’t be so sensitive, of course I do. I don’t have much yet.   It just dawned on me where I know the terrifying woman from. I saw her in the photo on the wall in the laundry room—just to the right of the Miele washing machine and the dryer, I noticed it on the first day. But to get nightmares from that is really too much.

About the Author

DANIEL KEHLMANN was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. His works have won the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the greatest successes in postwar German literature.

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