Review
Beware of Pity is the most exciting book I have ever read...a feverish, fascinating novel. --ANTHONY BEEVOR, Sunday Telegraph
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)
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)
Review
"Beware of Pity is the most exciting book I have ever read...a feverish, fascinating novel." Anthony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product 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.
About the Author
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.
