Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. This extraordinary novel offers invaluable and compelling insight on an intolerable chapter of Austria's past.

You don't so much read Sem-Sandberg as stand in the fiery wind of his prose . . . There is something here of Samuel Beckett's trilogy - nothing is too small to shine an unwavering light on . . . The Chosen Ones is the logical outlay of a worst-case scenario of the human soul. It is not a book that can be read for "delight", though it features beautiful sentences, and when Sem-Sandberg describes landscape and weather he has the sudden generosity of a poet. But he is also the ambassador of the unwanted child everywhere, then and now, and that is a rarer profession even than poet . . . Some novels are described as dark, in order to alert the reader. But this novel, translated into English by Anna Paterson, is as bright as a cloudless June sky under which, behind walls and doors, we go about our inexplicable human business.