From the celebrated author of The Radetzky March comes the tragic story of a WWI officer caught in the tumult of a world on the verge of modernity.
As an Austro-Hungarian officer on the Eastern Front of World War I, Franz Tunda was captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia. Dreaming of a return to his life in Vienna, he escapes from prison-only to get caught up in the Russian Revolution, fall in love, and fight for the Bolshevik cause.
Upon finally returning to Europe, Tunda finds that the old order is gone and the Europe he once knew has changed utterly. Disillusioned and without a land to call home, Joseph Roth's tragic hero is a masterful expression of the archetypal modern man taken up by the currents of history.
"Roth has the technique and style of a major writer . . . His prose is always equal to the diverse effects he demands of it-nicely modulated irony, lyrical flights, hard concrete descriptive passages."
The New Republic
"Roth, who until his death in 1939, was among the prominent of German writers in exile. His taut style . . . details without pity the inner life of the inauthentic self."
