Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in 20th Century

1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier; Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.

James Acton has come to the village of Upton to begin again. As his grief over the death of his wife eases, he hopes to find new purpose as the vicar of this small Hampshire parish, still emerging from the long shadow of the war. James’ own war was in the Western Desert, where he fell in love, first with the thrill of being a hurricane pilot and then with Yvette Haddad, the captivating, enigmatic young Alexandrian with a penchant for dangerous driving.

Italy is exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of the inept moderates and the agonising machinations of a democracy that no longer seems to be working. While the leaders of the country have sat idly in the safety of parliament, achieving nothing, one man on the outside has risen to the top. Like an animal, he can smell that change is coming. He is Benito Mussolini.

When Jozef is commissioned to paint a portrait of the younger daughter of Krakow's grand Oderfeldt family, it is only his desperate need for money that drives him to accept. He has no wish to indulge a pampered child-princess or her haughty, condescending parents - and almost doesn't notice Alicia's bookish older sister, Karolina. But when he is ushered by a servant into their house on Krakow's fashionable Bernadynska street in the winter of 1937, he has no inkling of the way his life will become entangled with the Oderfelts.

In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons.

The narrator of The Pages is not a human but a book: a first edition of Joseph Roth’s masterpiece Rebellion, rescued from a Nazi book-burning in 1933. In recounting its history, it tells a multitude of stories: of Andreas, the character who lives in its pages; of its current owner, a woman whose discovery of a hand-drawn map in the book begins a thrilling mystery; and of Roth himself, a writer on the run. Together, they form a compelling story about art, nationalism, the weight of history, and the strange connections between us.