Grove

Profoundly empathetic, and austere – a minor-key exploration of landscape and land.

Grove is a novel in three parts, each following a different journey through Italy.

In the first, the bereaved narrator spends a winter in a village southeast of Rome, wandering between village and cemetery, observing both the banal and the sublime. Her gaze—shaped by grief but also by curiosity—connects the details of daily life to places of the dead, from local graves to ancient Etruscan tombs.

The second part shifts to the Italy of the 1970s, recalled from her childhood visits with her father. Memories of Communist rallies, roadside restaurants, films, birds, and necropoli form a fragmented mosaic of a bygone era that frames the present.

The third part unfolds in the flat expanses of northern Italy, between Ferrara and the Po estuary, some years after the loss. Birds, landscapes, and the silent ruins of Spina accompany a narrator who has reached a tentative reconciliation with grief, even as contemporary Italy appears marked by wandering refugees and quiet towns.

Esther Kinsky’s Grove is a uniquely sensorial journey—outward through Italian landscapes and inward toward solace, closure, and the beauty found in attentive seeing.

»What makes Grove so noteworthy is the keening, perfectly weighted clarity of Esther Kinsky’s prose« Lucy Scholes, Financial Times

»This is a sublime book, born of profound, empathetic understanding.« Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times

»The language and atmosphere is again redolent of Kinsky’s compatriot WG Sebald, the much-missed psychogeographer. With Grove, she has reached his level. This is a book that finds a kind of comfort in the transience of being human.« i