> Skip to content
  • Published: 3 January 1995
  • ISBN: 9780099424918
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

Darkness at Noon




'One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it' New Statesman

Darkness at Noon is set in an unnamed country ruled by a totalitarian government. Rubashov, once a powerful player in the regime, finds the tables turned on him when he is arrested and tried for treason. His reflections on his previous life and his experiences in prison form the heart of this moving and though-provoking masterpiece.

  • Published: 3 January 1995
  • ISBN: 9780099424918
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:

About the author

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the University of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England, adopting the language with his first book in English, Scum of the Earth. His publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests, and include Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

Also by Arthur Koestler

See all

Praise for Darkness at Noon

A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of...all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualised drama of prison psychology

Times Literary Supplement

[Darkness At Noon] is written from terrible experience. From knowledge of the men whose struggles of mind and body he describes. Apart from its sociological importance, it is written with a subtlety and an economy which class it as great literature. I have read it twice without feeling that I have learned more than half of what it has to offer me- Koestler approaches the problem of ends and means, of love and truth and social organisation, through the thoughts of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, as he awaits death in a GPU prison

New Statesman

Along with Animal Farm and 1984, this book formed part of the essential bookshelf of those intellectuals who repudiated their early illusions about the Soviet Union

Christopher Hitchens, The Week

It brilliantly portrays the chilling tyranny of Soviet Communism

Sandy Gall, The Week

One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it.

New Statesman