Job

Joseph Roth

Translated by Dorothy Thompson

‘Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow, in Russia, a man named Mendel Signer. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely commonplace Jew…’

So Roth begins his novel about the loss of faith and the experience of suffering. His modern Job goes through his trials in the ghettos of Tsarist Russia and on the unforgiving streets of New York. Mendel Singer loses his family, falls terribly ill and is badly abused. He needs a miracle…

Extraordinary... A powerful work by a titan of early 20th-century literature

Alistair Mabbott, Herald

[A] tender fable.... Dorothy Thompson's translation is enthralling

Max Lui, Independent

One of the great European novelists of the century

Sunday Times

The Author

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler’s assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty a few years later. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls, The Emperor’s Tomb and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

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