The Post Office Girl

It's the 1930s. Christine, a young Austrian woman whose family has been impoverished by the war, toils away in a provincial post office. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from an American aunt she's never known, inviting her to spend two weeks in a Grand Hotel in a fashionable Swiss resort. She accepts and is swept up into a world of almost inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire, where she allows herself to be utterly transformed. Then, just as abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose and she has to return to the post office, where - yes - nothing will ever be the same.

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. The most widely translated writer of the 1920s and 1930s, he was closely identified with the humanitarian and tolerant values of pre-war Vienna. With the rise of Nazism he was forced into exile, first in London, then New York and finally Brazil, where he committed suicide in a pact with his wife. The manuscript for The Post Office Girl, his second novel, was found among his papers. This is the first time it has been translated into English. Zweig's other celebrated works are the novel Beware of Pity and the novella, Chess Story.