The Threshold and the Ledger

A riveting non-fiction book by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.

Published just before the centenary year of one of the German-speaking world's most extraordinary post-war writers, Tom McCarthy's short book unpacks a single poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. Latching onto two of its central terms - the eponymous threshold and ledger - McCarthy takes off on a line of flight that carries the reader through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) may have spent her career in shadow of her lover Paul Celan; but since her untimely death her star has outshone even his. In recent years more and more Anglophone writers and readers have been switching on to her importance.