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 a tragédie humaine achieved 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 book The Radetzky March (Penguin Classics) and, as soon as I finished reading it, I read it all over again.

'Delights, amuses, moves and angers you with the lightest of touches. It is, as might be said of Cadence herself, a small masterpiece'

'Wonderful, funny, poignant and gutsy...you can feel the author's huge and hurt and loving heart beat on every page'

'An intensely enjoyable novel about friendship and prejudice: the dialogue is word perfect, the psycology laser fine, and there are some terrific jokes... but no synopsis can do justice to this glorious book'