BURNING SECRET is set in an Austrian sanatorium in the 1920's. A lonely twelve-year-old boy is befriended and becomes infatuated by a suave and mysterious baron who heartlessly brushes him aside to turn his seductive attentions to the boy's mother. Stefan Zweig, the author of Beware of Pity and Confusion provides the reader, in this newly available translation, with a study of childhood on the brink of adolescence and a boy's uncontrollable jealousy and feelings of betrayal.
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoyed literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.
ISBN 978 1 901285 857
Fiction 100 pages
"Reviving his reputation as a major writer of the 20th century"
The Independent
"Zweig is the most adult of writers; civilised, urbane, but never jaded or cynical; a realist who none the less believed in the possibility - the necessity - of empathy" The Independent
"Zweig's genius as a storyteller encompasses the brainy as well as those of average intelligence, the very rich and the desperately poor. He deserves to be famous again, and for good"
The Times Literary Supplement
"To read Zweig is to be in the presence of a properly mature writer, for all that his characters are often in the grip of highly inappropriate desires"
The Guardian
" He was capable of making the reader live other people's deepest experience - which is a moral education in itself. My advice is that you should go out at once and buy his books"
The Sunday Telegraph
