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  • Published: 15 September 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099490685
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $40.00

The Invisible Writing




The second volume of the eye-opening adventure story that is Arthur Koestler's autobiography - Koestler is the acclaimed author of anti-Soviet dystopia Darkness at Noon

The second volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon.

Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of a twentieth-century life. The Invisible Writing picks up where the first volume, Arrow in the Blue, ended, with Koestler joining the Communist Party. This second volume goes on to detail some of the most important, gruelling and electrifying experiences in his life.

This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. It tells of how he survived in Franco's prisons under sentence of death and in concentration camps in Occupied France and ends with his escape in 1940 to England, where he found stability and a new home.

  • Published: 15 September 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099490685
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 544
  • RRP: $40.00

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.

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Praise for The Invisible Writing

A brilliant and deeply moving record of a whole generation as well as of an individual

Observer

The cumulative effect is overwhelming

New Republic

He is a journalist of ideas on a very high level - the kind we lack and need in this country - who functions midway between the realms of art and of society, but whose function is indispensable, if thought is to be part of culture

Saturday Review

Perhaps the most remarkable autobiography since the confessions of Rousseau

V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman