Hannelore Valencak

born 1929 in Donawitz in Styria, was trained as a physicist. She worked as a metallurgist for a Styrian steel plant and from 1962 onwards as a patent administrator in Vienna. She began writing poetry and fiction as a freelance author in 1975 and has published five novels as well as several books for young readers. Hannelore Valencak died in 2004 in Vienna. “Das Fenster zum Sommer” (“Summer Window”), originally published in 1967 under the title “Zuflucht hinter der Zeit” (Refuge behind time), was turned into a motion picture starring Nina Hoss in 2011. “Die Höhlen Noahs”, her first novel, was originally published in 1961.

Books

Hannelore Valencak - Noah’s caves

The end of the world isn’t picky. But what if you survive? Just like Martina and her little brother who are saved from the flaming inferno by a young stranger. They meet other survivors, an old man and his granddaughter, with whom they flee to the next valley. Does life end here or does it begin anew? The world beyond the mountains is dead, burnt, buried in toxic dust. What is left after the disaster is barely enough for survival, just enough for life in a cave. After they get settled in they start waiting – but for what? There is no saving ark in sight. The old man surly doesn’t believe in the future. A struggle begins – for survival, for hope, for remaining human. Hannelore Valencak creates gloomy scenarios to illustrate the world after the end of the world: even more radical than Marlen Haushofer’s “The Wall” and more relentless than Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.

Hannelore Valencak - Summer Window

Roman

Ursula has both feet firmly on the ground: She’s young, in love, just happily married and together with her husband Joachim she has just renovated a little house and is looking forward to the first vacation together. But when she wakes up the morning before their holiday Joachim has disappeared, she is no longer at her house, and there are frost patterns on her window which she finds quite unusual for it being in the middle of July: Mysteriously she finds herself thrown back into the past, into the apartment of her overbearing aunt Priska, the gray everyday life awaiting her at the office – a life that marriage had just released her from. In vain she tries to expedite the course of events and to reach her husband who does not know anything about her yet until she realizes that she has to go the same path as unchanged as possible. But will everything fit together in the end, so that the encounter that made her life take such a lucky turn will actually take place again? Or will what at first seemed like a mean set-back in reality turn out to be a second chance? Like Marlen Haushofer, Hannelore Valencak deserves to be read by a new Generation. “Summer Window” was first published in 1967 under the title “Zuflucht

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