You Should Have Left: A Novel

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Director, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse

“Mind-bending. . . . Part horror, part science fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review

"This is a story about a marriage in trouble, and about a seemingly impossible desire to protect a young child . . . but also about something else, something unavoidable and powerful but terrifyingly vague.” —The Spectator

“Clever, exquisitely terrifying. . . . [Kehlmann] makes entertainment out of metaphysics.” —Harper’s Magazine

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.

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.