Book description
BURNING SECRET is set in an Austrian sanatorium in the 1920's. A
lonely twelve-year-old boy is befriended and becomes infatuated by a
suave and mysterious baron who heartlessly brushes him aside to turn
his seductive attentions to the boy's mother. Stefan Zweig, the
author of Beware of Pity and Confusion provides the reader, in this
newly available translation, with a study of childhood on the brink
of adolescence and a boy's uncontrollable jealousy and feelings of betrayal.
STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a well-to-do
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 an apparent double
suicide. ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for
translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the
Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald's
Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation.
She lives in Cambridge, England.
