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Translated from the German by B. Musgrave and D. Le Vay
After many adventures, a young Austrian soldier returns home
after the Great War. Having fought with the Red Army during
the Russian Revolutionary War and worked as a Soviet official
he arrives back in bourgeois Vienna to find that it no longer
has a place for him.
His father has died and his fiancée, who had waited
many years for his return, has married another man and left
for Paris; there is nothing for an ex-soldier in Austria at
the end of the Hapsburg empire. He travels Europe searching
in vain for a place to belong, not with his estranged brother
in Germany nor with his former fiancée in Paris. This
is the story of a young man’s alienation and his search
for identity and home in a world which has changed out of
all recognition from the one in which he grew up.
‘Almost perfect.’ — Rolling Stone
‘A very fine writer indeed.’ — Angela Carter, Guardian
‘A novelist whose major novels deserve a wide readership.’
— Sunday Times
‘A concise, powerful writer who brilliantly evokes the
social, political and intellectual turmoil of the era.’
— Publishers Weekly
JOSEPH ROTH was born in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire
in 1894 and fought in the Austrian army during the First World
War. He worked as a journalist in Frankfurt before leaving
Germany for France in 1933. He died in Paris in 1939. He also
wrote The Radetzky March, String of Pearls,
The Silent Prophet and The Legend of the Holy Drinker.
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