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  • Published: 2 July 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241649541
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $22.99

Count Luna




A deliciously deranged thriller about supernatural vengeance and postwar guilt, by one of Austria's most celebrated writers

Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful - but in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence. When Jessiersky's board of directors sends his mysterious neighbour Count Luna to a concentration camp on trumped-up charges in order to seize his land, Jessiersky can't shake the feeling that Count Luna blames him - and, after the war ends, that Count Luna will have his revenge. So begins a wild, weird and witty cat-and-mouse chase through windswept moors, shadow-filled houses and, eventually, the catacombs of Rome, as an increasingly paranoid Jessiersky asks himself: who is Count Luna? Where is he hiding? And will he stop at nothing - not even the edges of the plausible and canny - to exact his bloody venegance?

  • Published: 2 July 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241649541
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $22.99

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Praise for Count Luna

A book so astonishing that I immediately re-read it, fearful it might disappear

Patti Smith

Daunting panache, fast-moving, cleverly convoluted, terrific

Irish Times

In Count Luna, an industrialist inadvertently responsible for sending a man to a concentration camp feels certain that the fellow survived the war and is mounting a shadowy campaign of revenge. Like Kafka [...] Lernet-Holenia weaves his most intimate hopes and dreams into the texture of what happens next with exquisitely imagined detail

Chicago Tribune
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