Tarabas (A Guest on Earth): A New Translation

A gypsy woman tells the young Nicholas Tarabas his fate: he will be both a murderer and a saint. It is not the kind of prophecy a young man knows what to do with. He will spend his entire life finding out.

From provincial Russia to New York, from the trenches of the First World War to the command of a Galician garrison town, Tarabas moves through the upheavals of the early twentieth century with the terrifying force of a man who has never found a place he belongs. He is brave beyond reason, brutal beyond necessity, and possessed of a certainty that ordinary men find either magnetic or unbearable. Then, in a small town called Koryla, he commits an act of cruelty he cannot walk away from - and the second half of the prophecy begins.

First published in 1934, the first novel Roth completed in exile after fleeing Hitler's Germany, Tarabas is one of his most elemental and most haunting works - a novel written in the register of folk tale and fable, following a single extraordinary soul from violence to repentance across a landscape of war, revolution, and destruction. Hermann Hesse called it one of Roth's most beautiful books.

A novel about fate, guilt, and the extraordinary cost of becoming what you were always meant to be.

By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March.