Count Luna

Lernet-Holenia, Alexander

£9.99

At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests the Nazis, and when his board of directors asks him to go along with confiscating a neighbour’s large parcel of land for their thriving wartime business, Jessiersky refuses. Yet, without his knowledge, the board succeeds in sending the owner of the land, a certain Count Luna, to a Nazi concentration camp on a trumped-up charge. Years later the war is over, but after a series of mysterious events, Jessiersky, deeply paranoid, becomes convinced that Count Luna has survived and seeks vengeance; driven to kill the source of his dread, he decides to hunt down Luna – and his years-long chase after the spectral count finally takes him deep into the catacombs of Rome.

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Publish Date: 28/03/2024

Description

‘A book so astonishing that I immediately reread it, fearful it might disappear’ Patti Smith

The war is over but Alexander Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian aristocrat and industrialist, is haunted by guilt over the neighbour he inadvertently sent to a concentration camp, Count Luna. What’s more, he is convinced that Luna survived – and is out to get his revenge. So begins a wild, weird cat-and-mouse chase that takes him and his shadowy nemesis through windswept valleys, eerie houses and, eventually, Rome’s catacombs, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: will Luna stop at nothing to exact his bloody vengeance? Crazed, raging and darkly comic, Count Luna is a reckoning with postwar guilt, and an irresistible tale of the uncanny.

‘Like Kafka … Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams … with exquisitely imagined detail’ Chicago Tribune

Additional information

Weight 123 g
Dimensions 198 × 129 × 8 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

160

Language

English

Edition

Reprint

Dewey

833.912 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K