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With a new introduction by Michael Hofmann, a reissue of one of Roth's most prominent novels, which explores the loss of faith and the experience of suffering

About the Author

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he later died in poverty. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

Michael Hofmann is the highly acclaimed translator of Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Kafka, and Brecht and the author of several books of poems and book of criticism. He has translated nine previous books by Joseph Roth. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Reviews

Extraordinary... this is a poetically written novel, speaking of the eternal truths of the human condition. A powerful work by a titan of early 20th-century literature
*Herald*

[A] tender fable.... Dorothy Thompson's translation is enthralling
*Independent*

One of the great European novelists of the century
*Sunday Times*

Roth... can pack more into a few pages than lesser writers can do in a few hundred. But his lightness of touch has a deceptive historical weight
*Times Literary Supplement*

Roth is one of those rare and welcome talents whose concision and deceptive simplicity send the cogs of the imagination whizzing into overdrive
*Sunday Telegraph*