The Exiles Return

By Elisabeth de Waal
Preface by Edmund de Waal

Unpublished during Elisabeth de Waal's lifetime, The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost.  As Edmund de Waal writes in his Preface about his grandmother's highly autobiographical novel, she "was Viennese and this is a novel about being Viennese. As such, it is a novel about exile and about return, about the push and pull of love, anger and despair about a place which is part of your identity."

With immaculate precision and sensitivity, de Waal, an exile herself, captures a city rebuilding and relearning its identity, and the people who have to do the same. Mesmerizing and tragic, de Waal has written a masterpiece of European literature, an artifact revealing a moment in our history, clear as a snapshot, but timeless as well.

Hardcover
328 pages
Persephone Press, 2025
5.51 x 1.1 x 7.48 inches
ISBN 9781903155929
Literature, Viennese Occupation