You Should Have Left: A Novel

Daniel Kehlmann

Jun 2017 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

Now a Major Motion Picture

From the internationally bestselling author of Measuring the World and F, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse

A screenwriter, his wife, and their four-year old daughter rent a house in the mountains of Germany, but something isn’t right. As he toils on a sequel to his most successful movie, the screenwriter notices that rooms aren’t where he remembers them—and finds in his notebook words that are not his own.

Ratings and reviews

To me, it read as a mash-up of "evil house/another dimension" stories and movies I've read/watched before. Of course, The Shining comes to mind, as well as 1408, the cartoon Coraline, etc. I don't know what would make a writer do something like this, other than an exercise in reheating someone else's dish and garnishing it with a semi-fresh herb sprig here and drop of a faux-luxe (but really canned) sauce there. Pretentious, often boring, hugely predictable, self-servingly dramatic, but ultimately climax-less (a classic cop-out of a lazy writer: Finish with something akin to a dark screen at the end of Sopranos). Just meh in the end.

Loved the fragmented writing. Perfect for someone with a short attention span. Confusing at first, and poetic at times, but intriguing till the end. Very cool spin on the haunted house story.

The narration is scattered and confusing at times. There were many really creepy parts. Short read.

About the author

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. His works have won the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Measuring the World was translated into more than forty languages and is one of the greatest successes in postwar German literature.