**A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke--one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original works *On a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure ha...

**A major new novel from the Nobel laureate Peter Handke--one of his most inventive and dazzlingly original works *On a summer day under a blue sky a man is stung on his foot by a bee. "The sting signaled that the time had come to set out, to hit the road. Off with you. The hour of departure has arrived." The man boards a train to Paris, crosses the city by Métro, then boards another, disembarking in a small town on the plains to the north. He is searching for a young woman he calls the Fruit Thief, who, like him, has set off on a journey to the Vexin plateau. What follows is a vivid but dreamlike exploration of topography both physical and affective, charting the Fruit Thief's perambulations across France's internal borderlands: alongside rivers and through ravines, beside highways and to a bolt-hole under the stairs of an empty hotel. Chance encounters--with a man scrambling through the underbrush in search of his lost cat, and with a delivery boy who abandons his scooter to become a fellow traveler for a day--are like so many throws of the dice, each exposing new facets of this mysterious individual in the manner of a cubist portrait. In prose of unrivaled precision, lucidly rendered into English by Krishna Winston, The Fruit Thief * elevates the terrain of everyday life to epic status, and situates the microgeography of an individual at the center of a book like few others. This is one of Nobel laureate Peter Handke's most significant and original achievements.