Darkness at Noon
  • Published: 5 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473549388
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

Darkness at Noon

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Sep 2019
Paperback
17 Nov 2020
Paperback
3 Jan 1995
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A brilliant new translation, based on Koester's long-lost original manuscript - the chilling, unforgettable portrayal of a Soviet revolutionary who falls foul of the regime to which he has dedicated his life.

A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic.

From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects. Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party’s aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he’ll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed.

Darkness at Noon is as gripping as a thriller and a seminal work of twentieth-century literature. Published in Great Britain in 1940, it was feted by George Orwell, went on to be translated into thirty languages and is considered the finest work of pre-eminent European master, Arthur Koestler. And yet the novel’s worldwide reputation has, for over seventy years, been based on the first incomplete and inexpert English translation – Koestler’s original manuscript was lost when he fled the German occupation of Paris in 1940.
In 2016, a student discovered that long-lost manuscript in a Zurich archive. At last, with the publication of this new translation of the rediscovered original, Koestler’s masterpiece can be experienced afresh and in its entirety for the first time.
THE NEW TRANSLATION BY PHILIP BOEHM
  • Published: 5 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781473549388
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
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About the author

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the University of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England, adopting the language with his first book in English, Scum of the Earth. His publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests, and include Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

Also by Arthur Koestler

The Sleepwalkers
Arrow in the Blue
The Invisible Writing
The Gladiators
Arrival and Departure
See all

Praise for Darkness at Noon

A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of...all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualised drama of prison psychology

Times Literary Supplement

[Darkness At Noon] is written from terrible experience. From knowledge of the men whose struggles of mind and body he describes. Apart from its sociological importance, it is written with a subtlety and an economy which class it as great literature. I have read it twice without feeling that I have learned more than half of what it has to offer me- Koestler approaches the problem of ends and means, of love and truth and social organisation, through the thoughts of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, as he awaits death in a GPU prison

New Statesman

Along with Animal Farm and 1984, this book formed part of the essential bookshelf of those intellectuals who repudiated their early illusions about the Soviet Union

Christopher Hitchens, The Week

One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it.

New Statesman

Darkness at Noon is the sort of novel that transcends ordinary limitations...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling, and with such persuasive simplicity

New York Times, 1941

Darkness at Noon [is] a guided tour of a totalitarian mind... it gave me a deep, life-long interest in politics

Rafael Behr, Guardian

One of the most celebrated political novels of the 20th century

Guardian

A piece of brilliant literature

George Orwell
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