‘A book so astonishing that I immediately reread it, fearful it might disappear’ Patti Smith<\/b><\/p>\n
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<\/i> is a reckoning with postwar guilt, and an irresistible tale of the uncanny.<\/p>\n
‘Like Kafka … Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams … with exquisitely imagined detail’ Chicago Tribune<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests the Nazis, and when his board of directors asks him to go along with confiscating a neighbour’s large parcel of land for their thriving wartime business, Jessiersky refuses. Yet, without his knowledge, the board succeeds in sending the owner of the land, a certain Count Luna, to a Nazi concentration camp on a trumped-up charge. Years later the war is over, but after a series of mysterious events, Jessiersky, deeply paranoid, becomes convinced that Count Luna has survived and seeks vengeance; driven to kill the source of his dread, he decides to hunt down Luna – and his years-long chase after the spectral count finally takes him deep into the catacombs of Rome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[68],"product_tag":[393,328,127],"class_list":{"0":"post-102863","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","5":"product_cat-general-fiction","6":"product_tag-classic-fiction-pre-c-1945","7":"product_tag-fiction-in-translation","8":"product_tag-modern-contemporary-fiction-post-c-1945","9":"pa_book_author-lernet-holenia-alexander","10":"pa_cover-paperback","11":"pa_dewey-833-912-edition23","12":"pa_edition-reprint","13":"pa_imprint-penguin-classics","14":"pa_language-english","15":"pa_pages-8436","16":"pa_publisher-penguin-classics","17":"pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","19":"first","20":"onbackorder","21":"taxable","22":"shipping-taxable","23":"purchasable","24":"product-type-simple"},"yoast_head":"\n