The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth (Author)
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best-known for his novelsThe Radetzky March(also in Penguin Modern Classics),The Emperor's TombandThe Legend of the Holy Drinker .He died in Paris in 1939.

Roth is Austria's Chekhov
One of the greatest novels written in the last century
One of the most readable, poignant, and superb novels in twentieth-century German: it stands with the best of Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Robert Musil. Roth was a cultural monument of Galician Jewry: ironic, compassionate, perfectly pitched to his catastrophic era
A masterpiece . . . The totality of Joseph Roth's work is no less than atragédie humaineachieved in the techniques of modern fiction
The best novel is a book that, to my shame, I have only just read. Visiting Vienna earlier in the year, I realised how little I knew about the Austro-Hungarian empire. So I read Joseph Roth's 1932 bookThe Radetzky March(Penguin Classics) and, as soon as I finished reading it, I read it all over again.