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.
