You Should Have Left (Original title: Du hättest gehen sollen) is a 2016 novella by German writer Daniel Kehlmann.

He is on a deadline for the production studio and includes events from his daily life in his screenplay.

[3][4] December 2: An unnamed narrator rents a house through Airbnb to stay in on vacation with his wife and daughter.

It involves a woman with narrow eyes close to the root of her nose and yellow teeth.

In the store, the clerk does not speak much and struggles to retrieve every item on the shopping list.

The narrator hears a high-pitched voice through the baby monitor and checks on his daughter.

Seeing that there is nothing abnormal about her or the room, he returns to the kitchen where the monitor shows him hovering over his daughter.

December 6: The next morning, the narrator wishes to escape by paying for whatever taxi he could buy to leave.

The clerk says the building that had been there before the house was a tower built by the devil, and a wizard destroyed it with God's help.

The novella has been well received by critics because of the author's ability to blur the lines between reality and imagination.

Ulf Zimmerman complimented Kehlmann for demonstrating how to get his readers "to believe pretty much anything" and referenced the novel to have inspiration from Stephen King's The Shining.

[5] The Brooklyn Rail called the novel "a masterful experiment about the limits of literary realism" and credited Kehlmann's use of unreliable first-person narration.