From the author of The Radetzky March

The Silent Prophet is the result of Joseph Roth’s visit to Moscow in 1926 when speculation about the fate of Trotsky was rife. Roth refered to this work as his ‘Trotsky novel’, but the experiences of the book’s hero, the Trotsky-like Friederich Kargan, are as recognisably those of a less well-known Jewish outsider, a perpetual exile searching for a place in the new Europe and a set of values to counter his own scepticism and growing disallusionment — Joseph Roth himself.

Translated from the German by David Le Vay.

‘A novel one should not wish to be without . . . Roth is a very fine writer indeed.’ — Angela Carter, Guardian

‘With his [Roth’s] strikingly elliptical style which can evoke despair through real wit, it would be only mildly flattering to view him as a compassionate, laconic Conrad.’ — Time Out

‘No one since Pasternak has captured so well the dreadful benevolence of the Tsarist tyranny . . . But Roth also conveys the quiet despair of the rebel who knows that the instinct to revolt is already the instinct to rule.’ — Independent on Sunday

‘Deeply impressive.’ — Tribune

---

JOSEPH ROTH was born in Brody, Galicia – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in Ukraine – in 1894. He served in the Austrian army between 1916 and 1918. After the war he moved to Vienna and worked for newspapers in Austria and Germany. He established a reputation for himself as a brilliant and insightful journalist. As early as 1923 he warned against the threat of Nazism, travelling extensively not only across Austria and Germany but all over Eastern Europe and Russia where he reported on the Russian revolution. In 1933, with his warnings about Fascism unheeded, he left Germany in disgust and moved to Paris where depression and alcoholism overcame him. He drank himself into an early grave in 1939.