THE ROYAL GAME takes place on a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, where a tantalising encounter takes place between the reigning world chess champion and an unknown passenger. The stranger’s diffident manner masks his extraordinary ability to challenge the Grand Master in a game of chess, but also conceals his dark and damaged past, the horror of which emerges as the game unfolds.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN is the story of a middle-aged English widow who travels to escape loneliness and boredom. One evening while enjoying the elegant atmosphere of the Monte Carlo Casino, she becomes mesmerised by the obsessive gambling of a young Polish aristocrat. This fateful encounter leads to passion, despair and death, changing their lives forever.
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.
TRANSLATED BY B W Huebsch and Anthea Bell
Cover Illustration: Baccarat—The Fur Cape by Walter R Sickert
ISBN 1 901 285 61 8
