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Parting
W&N Essentials (Related to this series)
- Author
- Sebastian Haffner
- Narrator
- Thomas Judd
- Publisher
- Orion
- Publish Date
- 17 September 2026
- Run Time
- 5 hours 6 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
'Infused with the energy and the zest for life of youth' Philippe Sands
'A marvellous novella. Melancholy, hilarious, dramatic and fateful' Catherine Taylor
Paris, 1932. Two lovers, Raimund and Teddy, have just one day and one night to spend together before Raimund must return to Berlin.
A young German barrister, Raimund has followed the irresistible Teddy to Paris. Teddy moves effortlessly through the city's dazzling, bohemian social scene, where nights dissolve into dancing, cigarettes, aperitifs and plates of pommes frites, and mornings arrive long after noon.
Together, the pair roam through the city's cafés, restaurants and boulevards, from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. They bicker and flirt, scold and kiss, celebrating their freedom but knowing nothing can remain as it is, as the hour of Raimund's evening train comes ever closer.
Parting is an exquisite autobiographical novel capturing the last fragile moments of love and freedom before exile, fascism and war. Discovered after Sebastian Haffner's death, it became an instant German bestseller and has been hailed as a forgotten literary masterwork.
A W&N Essential translated and with an introduction by Michael Hofmann
Critics Review
-
Blithe and youthful and effervescent. Written at the very end of 1932, here is a paean to Paris, to Bohemianism and cosmopolitanism, almost to the very fact of being young, with the Nazi curtain about to fall on all that and more. Imagine if some Roman bard had composed something to celebrate the fabulous Herculanean spring of, oh, 79 AD
Michael Hofmann
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A sensational novel . . . As light and fleeting as happiness itself . . . It still reads almost as if we readers today could simply join this easy-going group in Paris that is being described, drink Chinese tea with them, smoke Gitanes and forget the time together
Die Zeit
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A marvellous short novella. Melancholy, hilarious, dramatic and fateful. This is the story of a group of penniless German emigrés, would-be Bright Young Things, in 1932 Paris, written by Haffner in real time
Catherine Taylor, author of The Stirrings
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A shockingly clear-sighted novel about a century-long love is now being published: Parting
Süddeutsche Zeitung
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It is about the last moments of happiness before catastrophe
Süddeutsche Zeitung
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Buoyant, but also elegiac . . . it is . . . exclusively, a very personal romance novel
Die Welt
-
The beautiful and the terrible, the light and the heavy, are condensed here in a narrative that can develop a physical power even in the most mundane: "I felt her voice again on my eardrum." Readers feel the same way
Der Speigel
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The story of a love that fades. And a snapshot of the generation between the two world wars, which is on its way to ruin with it eyes open
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
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Despite the novel's pervading sense of doom, the autobiographical love story retained a sense of hope
DW News
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What a book! Lightning-fast in his use of language, sometimes breathtaking, wonderfully carefree, and written with the uninhibited dedication that only a young and still virtually unknown author has. Heartbreaking
Rheinische Post
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They are free, young, carefree, melancholic and in love . . . Parting tells what is lost when we fall . . . The characters in Parting are prodigal sons and daughters by profession, they are expected at home by parents so that they can take exams and turn into trains. They savour freedom as long as they have it. Because we readers know how dark the future will be, Parting tells of the reason of irrationality
Republik
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A romance novel; a book of youthful exuberance of emotions, in which the premonition of what is to come resonates [with readers]
SWR
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Parting describes the melancholic search for happiness and freedom in Paris in the 1930s . . . Fast-paced and breathless on the one hand, but then also incredibly casual, playful and fragrant in spring, this novel tells of the freedom to seek happiness in melancholy; he is also a fabulous travel guide through the Latin Quarter of the early 1930s
NDR Kultur
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So heartbreaking and yet so cold-bloodedly written . . . a novel that is as graceful as it is magnificent
Uwe Wittstock
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His novel . . . is dabbed with impressionistic lightness
Matthias Zehnder
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Parting is . . . one of the classic novels of this German period of upheaval - between the exuberantly morbid mood of optimism at the end of the 1920s and the dark shadow that the Nazi regime cast on the mind and mind before it even began . . . the novel brilliantly knows how to reflect the mood of the time
Peter Meisenberg
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Sebastian Haffner
- Narrator
- Thomas Judd
- Duration
- 5 hours 6 minutes
- Release Date
- 17 September 2026
- ISBN
- 9781399645126
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Orion
- Genre
- Short stories, Fiction: literary and general non-genre
Synopsis
'A new-found classic to rival Waugh and Isherwood' Lucy Hughes-Hallett'Infused with the energy and the zest for life of youth' Philippe Sands'A marvellous novella. Melancholy, hilarious, dramatic and fateful' Catherine Taylor Paris, 1932. Two lovers, Raimund and Teddy, have just one day and one night to spend together before Raimund must return to Berlin. A young German barrister, Raimund has followed the irresistible Teddy to Paris. Teddy moves effortlessly through the city's dazzling, bohemian social scene, where nights dissolve into dancing, cigarettes, aperitifs and plates of pommes frites, and mornings arrive long after noon. Together, the pair roam through the city's cafés, restaurants and boulevards, from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. They bicker and flirt, scold and kiss, celebrating their freedom but knowing nothing can remain as it is, as the hour of Raimund's evening train comes ever closer. Parting is an exquisite autobiographical novel capturing the last fragile moments of love and freedom before exile, fascism and war. Discovered after Sebastian Haffner's death, it became an instant German bestseller and has been hailed as a forgotten literary masterwork.A W&N Essential translated and with an introduction by Michael Hofmann
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