An empire can collapse long before anyone is willing to announce its end.

Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, first published in German in 1932, follows three generations of the Trotta family through the declining decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, beginning with an accidental act of heroism that earns one soldier imperial favour and leaves his descendants burdened by a history they never could have imagined.

Within, Roth constructs a portrait of institutional decay through the private lives of those most devoted to preserving it. His characters inhabit a world of rigid hierarchies, inherited obligations, provincial boredom and increasingly hollow rituals, while the empire's impending dissolution gathers beyond their understanding. There is considerable comedy in Roth's treatment of officialdom, but also an extraordinary tenderness for people unable to imagine themselves outside the structures that confine them.

Both a family chronicle and an elegy for a vanished political order. Translated from German by Joachim Neugroschel.

David Campbell Publishers, London, 1996. Everyman's Library, Millennium Library edition. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light shelfwear and minor marking to jacket; handwritten numerical notation on copyright page. Otherwise appears well preserved.