The Café with No Name
A NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER
A vibrant tale of love, companionship, and renewal set against the transformations of 1960s Vienna.
Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived.
The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal. In the newspapers with which fishmongers wrap the char and trout from the Danube, one can read about great things to come, a bright future beginning to rise from the quagmire of the past. Enlivened by these promises, Robert refurbishes the café and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements. Some are in search of company, others long for love, or just a place where they can feel understood. As the city is transformed, Robert's café becomes at once a place of refuge and one from which to observe, mourn, and rejoice.
Combining the enchantment of warm prose with tender humor, Robert Seethaler has written a charming parable of human existence animated by unforgettable characters and a kaleidoscope of human stories.
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★ "A gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ "Beautiful... Seethaler's story bursts with empathy in its portrayal of a found family. This is a winner."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"How I loved this book! Filled with truth after truth, poignantly rendered and given to us with tender open-handedness. Seethaler is in his very own league, capturing a place and time that is ultimately universal."--Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy by the Sea
"Robert Seethaler has always created the epic from the ordinary...In The Café with No Name, he makes poetry out of the broken lives of the lost and disregarded who inhabit the margins of the great city and shows us how gold can be found in dust."--Anuradha Roy, author of All the Lives We Never Lived
"Infused with bright, beautiful glimmers of human connection, The Café with No Name is a novel as cozy and welcoming as the meeting-place established by its protagonist...Readers will turn the last page feeling an indelible part of the community Seethaler so lovingly and joyously brings to life."--Shannon Bowring, author of The Road to Dalton
"A masterful novel about work and love, connection and despair, how we carry one another, how we transcend the days and the indignities, and how no life is mundane...On page after page, Robert Seethaler's The Café with No Name strikes with the force of life."--Nick Arvin, author of Mad Boy
"Set in the 1960s and 1970s in a city where World War II still reverberates, Robert Seethaler's tender novel meditates on the passage of time and bonds that last."--Foreword Reviews
"Melancholy and gently understated... This is a sweet book, but it never cloys."--Vox
"200 pages of pure reading pleasure."--Florian Balke, FAS
"Magnificent! Highly and unequivocally recommended."--Florence Noiville, Le Monde
"There is so much at stake in this novel, almost everything."--Frankfurter Rundschau
"Seethaler is a god of ordinary people's feelings. His characters and settings come alive without a single wasted word and with no undue heaviness at all; his style is straightforward and pure."--Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"Seethaler moves from life's dramas to the love of Others and engages his readers to the point where they will feel as if they too are regulars at this Viennese café."--Il Piccolo
"When someone discovers that books are an important part of your life, the inevitable question follows: have you read something beautiful that you'd recommend? It would be all too easy to get entangled in the thicket of taste, attitude, books already read, personal predilections, etc. But to this question, there is an answer: the novels of Robert Seethaler. All of them, one after the other. And if you don't know where to start, you're in luck: start with his most recent book, The Café with No Name, a novel written by a pure talent, a storyteller beloved in German-speaking countries and translated into more than 40 languages."--Il Quotidiano
"Seethaler illuminates the lives of ordinary people, people who are making it up as they go along. His characters re vivid and relatable, and Seethaler renders them with a few simple strokes, as if he bumps into them every day at Simon's café."--Tagesspiegel
"Seethaler brings the lost souls of the city of Vienna to life."--ZDF Mittagsmagazin
"One doesn't need to read Robert Seethaler to understand that failure is often life's central experience. But you enjoy reading about it in Seethaler more than with any other writer, because he is so carefully, loving, and doesn't take detours or make excuses."--Süddeutsche Zeitung
"Seethaler writes with so much empathy. He has mastered the art of telling big stories about small lives."--dpa
"Seethaler has a special talent for portraying lives through their pure essence. This is a novel about survival, love, strength and death."--NDR Kultur
"Tells the story of life as a constant process of growth and decay."--ORF Ex Libris
