The Stefan Zweig Collection
Volume 4

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Three stories by Stefan Zweig, written over almost a quarter of a century, return to the same moment: the hour in which a hidden passion breaks through the surface of an orderly life.

In Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the guests at a Riviera pension before the First World War are scandalized when a respectable married woman runs off with a young Frenchman she has known for a single day. Only the narrator defends her, and his words move an elderly Englishwoman, Mrs. C., to confide a secret she has kept for more than twenty years: one night at the Monte Carlo casino, when she followed a young gambler, wild with despair at his losses, into the dark to stop him from killing himself.

Burning Secret (1911) is told largely through the eyes of a child. At a fashionable resort on the Semmering, above Vienna, a bored young baron singles out an elegant woman at his hotel and befriends her twelve-year-old son, Edgar, to reach her. The lonely boy is overjoyed to have a grown-up friend, until he senses that the adults are hiding something from him, and his confusion turns to jealousy, spying and open war.

The Wonders of Life (1904) is the early work of a young writer, set in Antwerp in the 1560s as the Reformation sweeps through the Netherlands. A merchant commissions an old German painter to paint a Madonna, and the painter finds the face he has been seeking in Esther, a young Jewish girl taken in as a foundling by an innkeeper.

This new translation presents all three works, read in full.