Product details
- ISBN 9780241674468
- Weight: 159g
- Dimensions: 130 x 197mm
- Publication Date: 13 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A haunting novel of love, fate and war from the Austrian master and acclaimed author of Baron Bagge and Count Luna ('A book so astonishing I immediately re-read it' – Patti Smith)
‘He’d had the feeling that he was expected there, on that day. But by whom?’
Vienna, 1939. Lieutenant Wallmoden is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’ when he meets the austerely beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors and her elusive circle of acquaintances. He promises to see her again – but then discovers his company has been mobilised for war. Marching across Europe, stumbling across the border between the living and the dead, one constant remains: he must keep his tryst with the Baroness, in this world or the next.
Banned by the Nazis and almost lost, Mars in Aries is an erotically charged ghost story, a shocking account of the invasion of Poland, and a mesmeric exploration of time and fate.
Translated by Robert Dassanowsky and John Barrett
Alexander Lernet-Holenia (Author)
Alexander Lernet-Holenia was born in Vienna in 1897. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and became a protégé of Rainer Maria Rilke. During his life he wrote poetry, novels, plays and was a successful screenwriter. His books were included on the first Nazi blacklist and subsequently burned, but after the end of the Second World War, he again became a vital figure in Austrian cultural life.
Robert Dassanowsky (Translator)
Robert Dassanowsky (1965-2023) was Professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, an independent film producer, former President of the Austrian Studies Association, and author of Austrian Cinema (2005); New Austrian Film, ed. (2011); World Film Locations: Vienna, ed. (2012); Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope 1933–1938 (2018). He was a member of the European Film Academy and fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
John Barrett (Translator)
John S. Barrett (1935) is a translator, reviewer and retired cardiologist. He has translated Grete Weil, Heimito von Doderer, Christa Wolf and Hanna Johannsen, among others. His translations have won the American Literary Translators’ Association Award, the Koret Foundation Award and the Batchelder Award for Children’s Literature.
