‘A master of characterization and delicate plotting’ New Yorker

‘In the first rank of German writers’ London Review of Books

As war between Prussia and Denmark brews over the territory of Schleswig-Holstein, a German nobleman is called to serve as a gentleman-in-waiting at the Danish court. Count Holk’s life so far has been happy and simple – he married for love, and his pious wife and canny brother have managed his estate so well that he’s even been able to carry out his dream, inspired by a romantic ballad, of building a castle by the sea.

But the expense of his architectural folly, the mounting political tensions in the air, and his rustic innocence all conspire to create a tragedy. Seduced by the worldly ways of the Danish courtiers, he begins an affair, and drifts ever farther away from his wife Christine. She, meanwhile, grows more and more serious as she watches the course of wider events. When they meet again in the country, will they be able to find a way back to the love they once shared?

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

Theodor Fontane (1819-98) was born in a small Prussian town and then moved to Berlin. He worked for most of his life as a journalist, and spent many years in London as a foreign correspondent for the Prussian intelligence agency. He began writing novels at the age of fifty-seven, and these works earned him an enduring reputation in German letters. Several of his realist masterpieces are published or forthcoming from Pushkin Press, including On Tangled Paths and Effi Briest.

Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers have translated multiple works by Theodor Fontane together. Separately, they have translated and authored works by and about Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth and other giants of German literature.

Reviews

A master of characterization and delicate plotting…one of Fontane’s most idiosyncratic achievements, and certainly one of the finest literary autopsies of a foundering relationship

New Yorker

[Fontane’s novels] place him in the first rank of German writers.

London Review of Books

No Way Back has the amplitude, the social and personal varieties, we expect of the major social novel; it surely ranks among the most imaginatively challenging and intellectually satisfying attainments in that dominant nineteenth-century form

Spectator

An uncommonly interesting writer whose novels continue to be so pleasurable to read. What makes them delightful… is their worldly, tolerant understanding of human frailty: the author’s refusal to condemn, preach morality, or be shocked by his characters’ errors, side by side with his rigorous honesty about their self-deceptions and his ability to see both sides of every question

New York Review of Books

No writer of the past or the present awakens in me the sympathy and gratitude, the unconditional and instinctive delight, the immediate amusement and warmth and satisfaction that I feel in every verse, in every line of one of his letters, in every snatch of his dialogue