The Call of the Toad

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 248, [2]. Publisher's cream cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. B/w line drawings by the Author. 1/15,000 copies printed.

Toning to textblock edges, else Fine.

Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. Originally published as Unkenrufe. Eine Erzählung., by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Deutschland, 1992.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The tale of an improbable late-middle-age love affair between a German art historian and a Polish art restorer who get into the cemetery business. A sharp satire on post-1989 Europe and Grass's first major work of fiction since The Rat in 1987. Basis for the 2005 film directed by Robert Gliński, starring Matthias Habich and Krystyna Janda. Winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. "A virtuoso, a vastly intelligent, sensitive, and humane writer with a zany eye for the preposterous." –The Washington Post