Betelgeuse
A linguistic work of art, spanning outer space and the world underwater
Theresa Neges lives in a tiny blue flat. She has no job and no money. All she has is Josef, her boyfriend – and even he isn’t entirely hers, although they love each other. Theresa walks the streets of Vienna in her big grey coat. She lies at the bottom of the public swimming pool and practises holding her breath, she makes herself dizzy on merry-go-rounds. What she really wants is to be in space: to be light, to float. And to be closer to Betelgeuse, the blazing red giant in the constellation of Orion, to which she has felt a connection since childhood.
A poetic novel, idiosyncratic and gorgeously crafted, with the kind of narrator you want to follow wherever she goes.
- A narrator drawn from among literature’s determined holdouts, from Virginia Woolf, Unica Zürn or Sylvia Plath to Friederike Mayröcker – eccentric and radical
- »Beyond the starry sky romance, Zeman succeeds in carefully and tenderly describing the feelings of a human breakdown.« ORF
- Nominated for the Austrian Book Prize 2024
- Translation Grant with New Books in German available
Barbara Zeman
Barbara Zeman, born in 1981, lives in Vienna. She is a historian and has worked as a journalist. In 2012 she won the Wartholz Prize, and in 2019 she published her debut novel Immerjahn. She has published numerous pieces in anthologies since then. In 2022 an extract from Betelgeuse was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
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