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The Café with No Name

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The Café with No Name

By: Robert Seethaler, Katy Derbyshire - translator
Narrated by: Rob Jones
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About this listen

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'How I loved this book . . . Seethaler is in his very own league' Elizabeth Strout

It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a café on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little café, and to Robert’s dream.

A story of the hopes, kindnesses and everyday heroism of one community, The Café with No Name has charmed millions of European listeners. It is an unforgettable novel about how we carry each other through good and bad times, and how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.

©2025 Robert Seethaler (P)2025 Canongate Books Ltd Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature Dream

Critic reviews

'Praise for Robert Seethaler: A Whole Life is a lovely contemplation of a life in solitude in a remote valley, into which the modern world slowly intrudes' (IAN McEWAN)

'Heart-rending and heartwarming. A Whole Life, for all its gentleness, is a very powerful book' (JIM CRACE)
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Loved the writing and the gentle threads running through this. Absorbing tale well told. Excellent

Lovely gentle tale

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This story started off so well and the narration was so good, I felt myself transported to that little town where everyone knows everybody. It's a story about the lives of people who live there. Their joys and their sorrows, their losses and their achievements. The characters were fine enough, it's just that the story became flat and despondent and even though I got through to the end, I'd lost interest by then.

The narration really set my mood

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I loved this book. Knowing the area where it takes place I realized how accurately it describes the time and place.

Wonderfully evocative.

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