Darkness at Noon

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Product details

  • ISBN 9781784873196
  • Weight: 218g
  • Dimensions: 131 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 17 Sep 2020
  • Publisher: Vintage Publishing
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic.

From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects. Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party’s aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he’ll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed.

Darkness at Noon
is as gripping as a thriller and a seminal work of twentieth-century literature. Published in Great Britain in 1940, it was feted by George Orwell, went on to be translated into thirty languages and is considered the finest work of pre-eminent European master, Arthur Koestler. And yet the novel’s worldwide reputation has, for over seventy years, been based on the first incomplete and inexpert English translation – Koestler’s original manuscript was lost when he fled the German occupation of Paris in 1940.

In 2016, a student discovered that long-lost manuscript in a Zurich archive. At last, with the publication of this new translation of the rediscovered original, Koestler’s masterpiece can be experienced afresh and in its entirety for the first time.

THE NEW TRANSLATION BY PHILIP BOEHM

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the University of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England, adopting the language with his first book in English, Scum of the Earth. His publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests, and include Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia. Philip Boehm translates books and plays by German and Polish writers such as Herta Müller, Franz Kafka and Hanna Krall. He also works as a stage director and playwright.

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