On a Day Like This A Novel

On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. When a routine doctor's visit leads to an unexpected prognosis, a great yearning takes hold of himbut who can tell if it is homesickness or wanderlust; a deathwish or a fresh lease on life? Andreas leaves everything behindsells his Paris apartment, cuts off all social ties, quits his teaching job, and waves good-bye to his days spent idly sitting in cafesto look for a woman he loved half a lifetime ago. The monotony of days had been keeping him in check; now he hopes for a miracle and for a new beginning. Andreas's travels lead him back to the province of his youth, back to his hometown in Switzerland where he returns to familiar streets, where his brother still lives in their childhood home, and where Fabienne, a woman he was obsessed with in his youth, continues to visit the same lake they once swam in together. Andreas, consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of his future, is tormented by the question of what might have been if things had happened differently. Peter Stamm has been praised as a "stylistic ascetic" and his prose as "distinguished by lapidary expression, telegraphic terseness, and finely tuned sensitivity" (Bookforum). InOna Day Like This, Stamm's unobtrusive observational style allows us to journey with our antihero through his crises of banality, of living in his empty world, to the realization that life is finitethat one must live it, as long as that is possible.

Peter Stamm was born in 1963, in Weinfelden, Switzerland. He is the author of the novel Agnes (1998) and numerous short stories and radio plays. His novel, Unformed Landscape, and the collection In Strange Gardens and Other Stories are available from Other Press. He lives outside of Zurich, Switzerland.

Michael Hofmann has translated the works of many German writers, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Peter Stephan Jungk. He is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently Approximately Nowhere, and a book of essays, Behind the Lines. He lives in Gainesville, Florida and London.