A witty novel of 'sublime simplicity' about an alcoholic vagrant who has a series of lucky breaks that lift him briefly onto a different plane of existence.
'One of the greatest European novelists of the century' - Sunday Times
This novella, one of the most haunting things that Joseph Roth ever composed, was published in 1939, the year the author died. Like Andreas, the hero of the story, Roth drank himself to death in Paris, but this is not an autobiographical confession. Rather, it is a secular miracle-tale, in which the vagrant Andreas, after living under bridges, has a surprising run of good luck that changes his circumstances profoundly. The novella is extraordinarily compressed, dry-eyed and witty, despite its melancholic subject matter.
