You Should Have Left: A Novel

the long version

"From the internationally best-selling author of Measuring the World and F, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse. "It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air." These are the opening lines of the journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel: the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany--a house that thwarts the expectations of his recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. The narrator is eager to finish a screenplay, entitled Marriage, for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him--and in himself"--