The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy

The restless King Oliver VII of Alturia, an obscure Central European state whose only notable exports are wine and sardines, wants nothing more than an easy life: so, plotting a coup against himself, King Oliver VII escapes to Venice in search of real experience. There he falls in with a team of con-men and ends up, to his own surprise, impersonating himself. His journey through successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about the world, about his own nature and the paradoxes of the human condition. Szerb offered Oliver VII as a translation from a non-existent English writer, A H Redcliff typical Szerb humor, or a reflection of the fact that as a rootless cosmopolitan his own work was banned by the Nazi regime?"

A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists.

"A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life" Paul Bailey,

In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb's last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s, it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died.

Antal SzerbThe Pendragon Legend, Oliver VIIJourney by MoonlightThe Queen's NecklaceLove in a Bottle and Other Stories

"No one who has read it has failed to love it." — Nicholas Lezard,

"Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century." — Paul Bailey,

ANXIOUS TO PLEASE his bourgeois father, Mihaly has joined the family firm in Budapest. Pursued by nostalgia for his bohemian youth, he seeks escape in marriage to Erzsi, not realising that she has chosen him as a means to her own rebellion. On their honeymoon in Italy Mihaly "loses" his bride at a provincial station and embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey that leads him finally to Rome. There all the death-haunted and erotic elements of his past converge, and he, like Erzsi, has finally to choose.

At an end-of-London-season soirée, the young Hungarian scholar-dilettante Janos Bátky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumors. Invited to the family seat — Pendragon Castle in North Wales — Bátky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go; but he does and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism and romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways — old libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains and underground tombs.

This selection of stories, set in mythical times and in 1920s and 1930s London and Paris, reflects Antal Szerb’s love of life and irrepressible irony that has become his trademark: from Szerb’s earliest stories, driven by his intense political and religious idealism, to his later work, marked by the sympathy and humour of and .