Books by Fleur Jaeggy

Compressed, delicate and brutally precise, Proleterka is a fierce coming-of-age story.

Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here, and as the narrator broods over her schemes to win the affections of the perfect new girl, the novel gathers an unsettling energy.

A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy's gothic imagination knows no limits. In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an 'eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm', and recognise the timbre of a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.