Beware of Pity

"Stefan Zweig's brilliant novel, Beware of Pity, is an original and powerful work."-The New York Times

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. Beware of Pity is an almost unbearably tense and powerful tale of unrequited love and the danger of pity.

In 1913, Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

Stefan Zweig's only novel is a devastating depiction of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, realised against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

'The novel I'll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig's frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939 ... an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best' -Times Literary Supplement

Author: Stefan Zweig

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Released Date: 2013

ISBN: 9781908968371