Confession of a Murderer

A man in a Paris Russian restaurant tells the story of his life to the strangers around him — and the story turns out to be one of espionage, aristocracy, betrayal, and murder in pre-war Russia and Europe. Roth wrote Beichte eines Mörders in 1936, the year before he died, and it carries all the melancholy of a writer who knew the world he was describing had already been destroyed. It is one of his stranger books — less elegiac than The Radetzky March, more lurid, and completely gripping.

This is the first English-language edition, published by Overlook Press in Woodstock, New York in 1985 under their Tusk imprint, translated by Desmond I. Vesey. The cover illustration — half face, half burning ruin — is one of the better pieces of 1980s paperback design. A good copy of a book that deserves more readers than it gets.