Written in a highly unreliable first person narrative, Ernst Weiss' unsung masterwork is an account of a crime and its aftermath. The hero (or villain) is tried, sentenced and deported to a remote island. He seeks redemption from his crimes in science, but eventually learns that in spite of himself he is a man of feeling. Weiss' book came out of the same fertile literary ground between the wars that produced Musil's The Man Without Qualities (Picador, 1930) and, like many other modernist classics, it is a prescient description of a profoundly unsettled society.