Book cover of Fear

Book description

A bourgeois housewife's affair is discovered, and a blackmailer turns her comfortable life into a nightmare of apprehension

Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother tedious after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Fear as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Speaking of psychoanalysis, like much of Stefan Zweig’s work, Fear was written at the dawn of the Freudian era, in 1913 (though it wasn’t published until 1920).

A married upper-class woman is blackmailed by the working-class girlfriend of her lover, and while the tale of her panic is sometimes just an illustration of the then-new concept of the subconscious, it’s riveting anyway.

In the fifties, it became the closest Roberto Rossellini ever came to making a film noir, with Ingrid Bergman.

From Laurence's list on novellas that transcend time.

If you love Fear...

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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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