Right And Left

Set in Berlin in the 1920s, Right and Left charts the rivalry of the two sons of a wealthy banker, one of them an early convert to fascism. It is a brilliant evocation of Berlin before the rise of Nazism; a society on the brink of disintegration.

Until now, Roth has been neglected outside the German-speaking world... In the poet Michael Hofmann he has found someone who can successfully translate his pellucid prose without losing any of its melancholy glow. Perhaps now Roth's reputation will finally take a turn for the better.

Literary Review

Joseph Roth is one of those rare and welcome talents whose concision and deceptive simplicity send the cogs of the imagination whizzing into overdrive.

Sunday Telegraph

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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The Translator

Michael Hofmann is a poet, translator and critic. His latest book of poems is One Lark, One Horse. He recently translated Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos.

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