Beware of Pity

Description

In 1913 a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible danger of pity. He had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance - his compensatory afternoon calls relieve his guilt but give her a dangerous glimmer of hope. Stefan Zweig's only novel is a devastating depiction of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, realised against the background of the disintegration of the Austro- -Hungarian Empire.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 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. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with WC the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York-a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled 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.

It's just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that I don't already know about this? Wes Anderson Zweig's fictional masterpiece Guardian The novel I'll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig's frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939 ... and part of the ongoing, valiant reprinting by Pushkin Press of Zweig's collected oeuvre; an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best -- Ali Smith TLS Book of the Year 2008 An unremittingly tense parable about emotional blackmail, this is a book which turns every reader into a fanatic -- Julie Kavanagh Intelligent Life (The Economist) Beware of Pity is the most exciting book I have ever read...a feverish, fascinating novel -- Antony Beevor Sunday Telegraph Original and powerful The New York Times Combines great storytelling with wonderful prose -- Jeffrey Archer Independent Beware of Pity is chillingly resonant in the Trump era... [in Beware of Pity] this sense of creeping decomposition is compulsively alive. It is hypnotic -- Simon McBurney Guardian I was riveted by it Colin Firth Absolutely marvellous Roy Hodgson In the novel a character remarks that 'the human tendency to self-delusion likes to declare dangers null and void even when we sense in our hearts that they are real Evening Standard (review of stage adaptation) Beware of Pity... is a tale of the past, memory and regret set in a world about to turn The Stage