"An unremittingly tense parable about emotional blackmail, this is a book which turns every reader into a fanatic" JULIE KAVANAGH, Intelligent Life (The Economist) "The great psychologists of love - Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev - never went further than this" JOAN ACOCELLA "Pushkin's fine list of classics continues with the only novel by Viennese master Stefan Zweig - both a shrewd political parable and a gorgeous period-piece" BOYD TONKIN, The Independent "A most powerful novel - What is so impressive about Beware of Pity is Zweig's ability to make us feel the violently shifting emotions of all his characters as if they were our own. Only a writer of great sensitivity could do this" ANTHONY DANIELS, The Sunday Telegraph "A complex, gripping, terrifyingly truthful yet unjudging study of emotional blackmail; the corrosive, even corrupting effects of compassion; and the realisation that 'no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it'" The Financial Times "The novel I'll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig's frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939 (...) and part of the ongoing, valiant reprinting by Pushkin Press of Zweig's collected oeuvre; an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best" ALI SMITH, TLS Book of the Year 2008

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.