The Silent Prophet

Friedrich Kargan has no country, no father, and no name that the world will recognize. Born illegitimate on the eastern margins of the old Russian empire, he finds in the revolutionary movement what his personal history has denied him: a purpose, a community, a reason to exist.

He will give everything to the cause - his youth, his freedom, years of Siberian exile, the one love of his life. And when the revolution finally succeeds, he will return to Russia to see what has been built in the name of everything he believed in.

What he finds will cost him the rest.

The Silent Prophet is Joseph Roth's own Trotsky novel - written in the late 1920s at the height of speculation about the fate of the exiled revolutionary, based on Roth's firsthand observations in Moscow in 1926, and never published during his lifetime. Set against the collapse of the old European order and the betrayal of the revolution by its own victors, it is a portrait of a man who gave himself entirely to history and was discarded by it - told with the precision, the melancholy, and the political intelligence that made Roth one of the essential writers of the twentieth century.

Three manuscripts survived his death in Paris in 1939. The novel was reconstructed and published in German in 1966, and in English in 1979. By the author of The Radetzky March.