Bøker av Joseph Roth

The incomparable Joseph Roth imagines Emperor Napoleon's last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica-an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates.Roth's signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. "There may be," as James Wood has stated, "no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile."

An unforgettable portrait of the Austro-Hungarian author of The Radetzky March, this biography in letters - selected here for the first time by Michael Hofmann - is classic European literature at its finest

A contemporary retelling of the Book of Job from the Bible.Job is the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious, destitute Eastern-European Jew and children's Torah teacher whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack. When he flees with his wife and daughter, further blows of fate await him. In this modern fable based on the biblical story of Job, Mendel Singer witnesses the collapse of his world, experiences unbearable suffering and loss, and ultimately gives up hope and curses God, only to be saved by a miraculous reversal of fortune.

Set in Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century, Zipper and His Father is Joseph Roth's compelling and wonderfully atmospheric portrayal of a childhood friend, Arnold Zipper, and his father, as seen through the eyes of a young boy.

Set in the early days of the Russian Revolution, Tarabas tells the story of Nicholas Tarabas, a young revolutionary ignominously dispatched from St Petersburg to New York by his outraged family.

Writing in the traditional form of the family saga, Roth nevertheless manages to bring to his story a completely individual manner which gives at the same time the detailed and intimate portrait of a life and the wider panorama of a failing dynasty.

In The Spider's Web, his first novel, Roth paints a chillingly realistic picture of the conspiracies of the radical right that were to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler and National Socialism.