Count Luna

Count Luna

Summary

'A book so astonishing that I immediately reread it, fearful it might disappear' Patti Smith

The war is over but Alexander Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian aristocrat and industrialist, is haunted by guilt over the neighbour he inadvertently sent to a concentration camp, Count Luna. What's more, he is convinced that Luna survived - and is out to get his revenge. So begins a wild, weird cat-and-mouse chase that takes him and his shadowy nemesis through windswept valleys, eerie houses and, eventually, Rome's catacombs, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: will Luna stop at nothing to exact his bloody vengeance? Crazed, raging and darkly comic, Count Luna is a reckoning with postwar guilt, and an irresistible tale of the uncanny.

'Like Kafka ... Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams ... with exquisitely imagined detail' Chicago Tribune

Reviews

  • A book so astonishing that I immediately re-read it, fearful it might disappear
    Patti Smith

About the author

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Alexander Lernet-Holenia was born in Vienna in 1897. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and became a protégé of Rainer Maria Rilke. During his life he wrote poetry, novels, plays and was a successful screenwriter. His books were included on the first Nazi blacklist and subsequently burned, but after the end of the Second World War, he again became a vital figure in Austrian cultural life.
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