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From master storyteller Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March, comes an intense, lyrical work about love, hate, and everything in between, in a brand-new translation
A young man walks into a café in 1930s Paris. Listening to the babble of Russian émigrés gossiping around him, he overhears people casually discussing a "murderer" called Golubtschik sitting right there in the café. Intrigued and appalled, the young man settles down to listen to Golubtschik’s life story after closing time. He spins a dark and captivating tale, detailing his story from its humble beginnings. The illegitimate son of a duke, he grew up with his poverty-stricken mother and her husband, always wondering how different his life might have been if he been brought up by the duke in luxurious surroundings. Recruited into the Russian secret service after a brush with the law, he travels to Paris and falls in love with the beautiful Lutetia, a volatile and enchanting woman. It is here in Paris that Golubtschik stumbles upon his legitimate half-brother in bed with Lutetia, and flies into a terrible rage. Beating them and leaving them for dead, he gets away with the crime and earns his reputation as a murderer. But as he finishes his tale in the Parisian café all these years later, there comes a twist to the tale which not even Golubtschik could have foreseen.
A young man walks into a café in 1930s Paris. Listening to the babble of Russian émigrés gossiping around him, he overhears people casually discussing a "murderer" called Golubtschik sitting right there in the café. Intrigued and appalled, the young man settles down to listen to Golubtschik’s life story after closing time. He spins a dark and captivating tale, detailing his story from its humble beginnings. The illegitimate son of a duke, he grew up with his poverty-stricken mother and her husband, always wondering how different his life might have been if he been brought up by the duke in luxurious surroundings. Recruited into the Russian secret service after a brush with the law, he travels to Paris and falls in love with the beautiful Lutetia, a volatile and enchanting woman. It is here in Paris that Golubtschik stumbles upon his legitimate half-brother in bed with Lutetia, and flies into a terrible rage. Beating them and leaving them for dead, he gets away with the crime and earns his reputation as a murderer. But as he finishes his tale in the Parisian café all these years later, there comes a twist to the tale which not even Golubtschik could have foreseen.
