Sara Baume

For fans of Jenny Offill and Rachel Cusk: A stunning, powerful new novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and learns truths about love, success versus failure, and what it means to restart our lives on our own terms.

Seven Steeples

The author of the award-winning Spill Simmer Falter Wither returns with a stunning new novel about a young artist's search for meaning and healing in rural Ireland. Struggling to cope with urban life-and life in general-Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family's rural house on "turbine hill," vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here-her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school-and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life. As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance. With "prose that makes sure we look and listen,"* Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life. *Atlantic

A Line Made by Walking

'Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither' is a wholly different kind of love story, a conversation almost entirely told from one side, that spans the four seasons echoed in the novel's title. Written with tremendous empathy and insight, Baume's debut captures the incremental destructive essence of loneliness.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither

In this contemplative short narrative, the artist and writer charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist

Handiwork

Stommelen stampen slaan / druk 1

Fiore frutto foglia fango

“It takes both daring and humility to write a book as unique as Seven Steeples. In unfailingly precise and lyrical prose, and with a religious attention to even the humblest things of this world, Sara Baume pays homage to nature, to hearth and home, and to the miracle of a love engendered by the union of two solitaries.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of the National Book Award Winner The Friend A stunning, powerful new novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society. It is the winter following the summer they met. A couple, Bell and Sigh, move into a remote house in the Irish countryside with their dogs. Both solitary with misanthropic tendencies, they leave the conventional lives stretched out before them to build another—one embedded in ritual, and away from the friends and family from whom they’ve drifted. They arrive at their new home on a clear January day and look up to appraise the view. A mountain gently and unspectacularly ascends from the Atlantic, “as if it had accumulated stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.” They make a promise to climb the mountain, but—over the course of the next seven years—it remains unclimbed. We move through the seasons with Bell and Sigh as they come to understand more about the small world around them, and as their interest in the wider world recedes. Seven Steeples is a beautiful and profound meditation on the nature of love and the resilience of nature. Through Bell and Sigh, and the life they create for themselves, Sara Baume explores what it means to escape the traditional paths laid out before us—and what it means to evolve in devotion to another person, and to the landscape.

Ein einsamer Mann Mitte fünfzig kommt ins Tierheim. Ray braucht einen Hund, wegen der Ratten in seinem Haus, und er sucht sich den traurigsten Köter von allen aus: Im Kampf mit einem Dachs hat Einauge den Kürzeren gezogen, daher sein Name. Er ist sehr schreckhaft, immer hungrig, und wenn andere Hunde in der Nähe sind, wird er aggressiv. Ray, der das von seinem Vater ererbte schäbige Haus an der See bisher kaum verlassen hat, findet in dem armen Kerl einen Gefährten und ein Spiegelbild. Frühmorgens unternehmen die beiden lange Strandspaziergänge – bis eines Tages eine Frau mit Hund ihren Weg kreuzt. Einauge fällt den Rivalen an, und das Unheil nimmt seinen Lauf. Bald darauf steht eine Polizistin vor der Tür. Ray wimmelt sie ab und flieht mit Einauge in seinem klapprigen Auto. So fahren die beiden, Menschen meidend, die irische Atlantikküste hinab, während es draußen immer kälter und das Geld immer weniger wird ... Eine traurige, eine herzzerreißende Geschichte, die Sara Baume in eine so klare wie schöne Sprache gehüllt hat. Ray und sein Hund bewegen sich durch ein wenig idyllisches Irland, Raffinerien, Parkplätze, Dreck – die Kunst der Autorin und ihre überragende Beobachtungsgabe machen aus dieser Flucht eine Reise voll dunkel strahlendem Glanz.

Die kleinsten, stillsten Dinge

Irske Sara Baume tog læserne med storm i sin umådeligt smukke debutroman vælde vokse vakle visne, og i hendes anden roman lever hun op til forventningerne, med en stadig sart og seismografisk, men denne gang også nærmest humoristisk-sarkastisk skrivestil. Linje trådt af trin er en roman om kreativitet og depression; en ganske ung kunsthistoriker opholder sig i sin afdøde mormors hus og prøver at finde ro til at finde ud af, hvad der er op og ned i tilværelsen. Hele tiden tester hun sin hukommelse ved at remse kunstværker af op, ligesom hun holder sig beskæftiget med bl.a. at fotografere døde dyr, alt imens hun undviger fra at se sig selv i spejlet, især i den mentale betydning.

Sara Baume

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