Perfectly paced and brimming with passion-twenty-two tales from a master storyteller of the twentieth century. In this magnificent collection of Stefan Zweig's short stories the very best and worst of human nature are captured with sharp observation, understanding and vivid empathy. Ranging from love and death to faith restored and hope regained, these stories present a master at work, at the top of his form. Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell ; 'One of the joys of recent years is the translation into English of Stefan Zweig's stories. They have an astringency of outlook and a mastery of scale that I find enormously enjoyable.'-Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes ; 'One hardly knows where to begin in praising Zweig's work .'-Nick Lezard ; 'Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella-Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov.'-Paul Bailey ; Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
