Rebellion

Joseph Roth is the least-known, yet easily the most accessible of the great twentieth-century writers. His deceptively light, massively concentrated fables of modern history evoke a world of catastrophic change, of disastrous belief and extreme loss. As the century ends, his stature is increasingly appreciated. And British readers, in particular, will find in his stories of a great empire's fall deep echoes of their own experience. Granta Books' major programme of republication of Roth's work continues with his last untranslated novel, The Rebellion. Michael Hofmann has said of it: 'You expect a novella, and he gives you an entire destiny.' The Rebellion is the story of a Great War veteran, Andreas Pum, who lost a leg and gained a medal. He marries, plays a barrel-organ, and is happy. But then he gets into a fight, and after prison meets an old comrade who has grown rich through cornering the market in lavatory-attendants. Pum becomes one of his employees, and in his new world of shiny white stalls he has a transfiguring experience of justice . . .