- Published: 30 January 2014
- ISBN: 9780141392165
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 256
No Way Back
A rich and enjoyable novel about marriage, love and betrayal, from the great German realist
Charming, cheerful Count Holk is delighted to be called away from his solemn wife to the distant court of a Danish princess. Swept up in the romance of his new, lively surroundings at a 'castle by the sea', the Count does not realize that not everyone there is what they seem - and that a wrong decision may have fatal consequences. Published in 1892, this tragicomic work of failing marriage and modern sexual politics is full of the irony, elegance and masterful dialogue for which Theodor Fontane is acclaimed.
- Published: 30 January 2014
- ISBN: 9780141392165
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 256
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About the author
Theodor Fontane, born in Neuruppin in 1819, was descended from French Huguenot settlers in Brandenburg, and was brought up on the Baltic Sea coast of Prussia before spending most of his life in Berlin. He trained as a pharmacist but in 1849 decided to earn his living as a writer. He spent several years as a foreign correspondent in London and his prolific non-fiction out-put includes journalism, poetry, theatre reviews, local travelogues of Berlin's hinterland, unpartisan accounts of Bismarck's wars and two autobiographical works.
He published his first novel, Before the Storm (1878), at the age of 58 and this was followed by sixteen further novels which established his reputation in the twentieth century as Germany's finest realist novelist. Fontane's sensitive portrayals of women's lives in late nineteenth-century society are unsurpassed in European literature. The Woman taken in Adultery (1882), Cécile (1886), Delusions, Confusions (1888), Jenny Teibel (1892) and Effi Briest (1895) focus on problems of love and marriage, while the late works The Poggenphul Family (1896) and The Stechlin (1898) provide humorous family portraits of Prussian society in decline. He died in 1898.
Praise for No Way Back
No Way Back has the amplitude, the social and personal varieties, we expect of the major social novel; it surely ranks among the most imaginatively challenging and intellectually satisfying attainments in that dominant nineteenth-century form
Paul Binding, The Spectator
Helen Chambers and Hugh Rorrison have improved on the previous English version...natural, idiomatic
Ritchie Robertson, Times Literary Supplement
Theodor Fontane's standing in Germany is comparable to Jane Austen's in the English-speaking world...his best work is an elegant and engaging blend of irony, penetration and compassion
Helen Chambers