Flicking through a Saturday edition of The Financial Times recently, I came across one of those Q&As in which someone in the public eye (I’ve forgotten who) is asked about their interests, habits, recommendations, and so on. The interviewee, when asked about the best book they had read in the past year, spoke effusively about Robert Seethaler’s novella, A Whole Life. I had never heard of the writer or the book and was surprised to learn that the book had been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. My only surprise after reading it is that it didn’t win.

In 150 pages of spare, elegant prose, Seethaler tells the story of Andreas Egger, a man who spends almost his entire life in the mountains of Austria. It’s a life of great simplicity marked by hard work, hardship, occasional cruelty, and a lot of solitude. “He had never felt compelled to believe in God, and he wasn’t afraid of death. He couldn’t remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn’t know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.”

A Whole Life is, quite simply, a wonderful work of art. What it does with great stealth and skill, in spare, soft-spoken prose of real elegance and power, is capture a simple life, and to encourage those who read it, without sermonizing, to make the best of their lives however those lives turn out. Unmissable, A Whole Life is close to perfection.