From The Man Booker International Prize finalist Robert Seethaler comes a tender, heartbreaking story of one young man and his friendship with Sigmund Freud during the Nazi occupation of Vienna.

Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz.

As political and social conditions in Austria dramatically worsen with the Nazis’ arrival in Vienna, Franz, Freud, and Anezka are swept into the maelstrom of events. Each has a big decision to make: to stay or to flee?

ROBERT SEETHALER was born in Austria and now divides his time between Vienna and Berlin. He is the internationally bestselling author of four novels, including The Tobacconist, which has sold more than 300,000 copies in Germany, and A Whole Life, a finalist for the International Booker Prize. He also works as a screenwriter and an actor, most recently in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth.

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CHARLOTTE COLLINS studied English at Cambridge University. She worked as an actor and radio journalist in both Germany and the U.K. before becoming a literary translator. She received the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life, which was also a finalist for the International Booker Prize and the International DUBLIN Literary Award. She co-translated the The Eighth Life, the acclaimed novel by Nino Haratischvili, and her other translations include Seethaler’s The Tobacconist and The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells.

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Set at a time of lengthening shadows, this is a novel about the sparks that illuminate the dark: of wisdom, compassion, defiance, and courage. It is wry, piercing and also, fittingly, radiant.

Daily Mail

The Tobacconist is a poignant, tragic look at the creeping rise of fascism in Vienna before the outbreak of the Second World War. Told with humor and pity, the novel expertly depicts how easy it is to find, and lose, one's place in the world.

Shelf Awareness

Seethaler blends tragedy and whimsy to create a bittersweet picture of youthful ideals getting clobbered by external forces.

Guardian

This powerful work evokes the hate-mongering and mistrust engendered by the war while leavening melancholy with sly wit.

Booklist

Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist is a coming-of-age story, that’s sweet, balanced between pathos and humour.

Toronto Star