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Waiting For Leah
  • Published: 1 July 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099464358
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $19.99

Waiting For Leah



'In my view, Lustig is the finest living Czech author and his work cries out for the Nobel Prize' - John Murray, Literary Review

It is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their 'final solution'. Compromises are being made on all sides, conditions are unspeakable, rumours are rife, but nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions.

On the outskirts of a concentration camp in northern Bohemia three people - two eighteen-year-old men and a desperately lost young woman, Leah - are thrown together, sharing their precarious existence in an attic room. While the world disintegrates around them their relationships are charged with passion, their days filled with erotic and spiritual attraction. Caught in the web of their relationships, their futures are uncertain and any choices they have left to make will be made in the face of almost certain death...

  • Published: 1 July 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099464358
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $19.99

About the author

Arnost Lustig

Arnost Lustig was born in Prague in 1926. In 1942 he was sent by the Nazis to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz, where his father died in the gas chambers, and finally to Buchenwald. He left Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation in 1968. He settled in 1970 in Washington D. C., where he was Professor of Literature at the American University. He is the author of The Unloved, Diamonds of the Night, A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova and Night and Hope. He is a two-time winner of the Jewish National Book Award. Arnost Lustig died in February 2011.

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Praise for Waiting For Leah

The power of his words lies in their very lack of melodrama... beautiful prose

Time Out

This wonderful book follows the shifting moralities of people caught in a hopeless situation

Good Book Guide