Little Apple

Description

Vittorin, a young Austrian officer, has just been released from a Russian POW camp toward the end of the Great War. In Vienna his family, his girlfriend, and his old job await him, but Vittorin can't think of settling down until he has settled the score with the sadistic camp commander, Staff Captain Selukov. Private obsession and political turmoil mix as Perutz leads his hero on a manhunt into the thick of the Russian civil war. In and out of prison, starving in the gutters of Moscow, thrown into revolutionary battle, Vittorin pursues his elusive quarry across postwar Europe. At each turn, he encounters only Fate's joker, until, back in Vienna, Fate plays him the biggest joke of all.

Leo Perutz is the author of eleven novels that attracted the admiration of such writers as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges. He was born in Prague in 1882 and lived in Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss, when he fled to Palestine. He returned to Austria in the fifties and died in 1957. Perutz's Master of the Day of Judgment, and St Peter's Snow are also available from Pushkin Vertigo.

A terrific storyteller The Times Russia in the aftermath of the Great War is the setting for this vertiginously paced story of revenge and derring-do... This is a gripping portrayal of a conflicted man and his time The Lady A work of genius -- Ian Fleming A fascinating novel, old-fashioned in the best sense in that it tells a tale, and truly modern in the way that the tale is told ... First rate Los Angeles Times Suspenseful ... Perutz's gifts as a storyteller are in evidence Boston Globe In a story that contains so many twists it is not unexpected that the denouement should bring yet another Crime Review