The acclaimed first English-language biography of the great European novelist and journalist, Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March, a writer who captured life in Europe between the wars like no other.

The acclaimed first English-language biography of the great European novelist and journalist, Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March, a writer who captured life in Europe between the wars like no other. The mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's gripping account of Roth's chaotic life speaks powerfully to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism. Published as Roth's works rapidly gain new readers and recognition, Endless Flight delivers a visceral yet sensitive portrait of his quest for belonging, and a riveting understanding of the brilliance and beauty of his work.

"This resplendent biography not only opens for us a window into a life unknown, but serves up a mirror inviting us to take a look at our own lives. We are left in no doubt that the forces that rended Roth's world are still active in ours" - The Times

"Absorbing... This is a thoughtful, thorough, and sympathetic book, and a necessary one... Endless Flight is a welcome aid for people like me who can't read Roth, or his critics and biographers, in German, and for any English-language readers who might want an introduction to his work. And now, more than ever, is the time to read him" - NYRB

"[Roth's] fiction may rob us of our illusions, but he singlehandedly, and with an extraordinary story-teller's gift of elegance and wit, cleared Europe's literary decks of their 19th-century hangovers and readied it for modernity. This fine biography, with its spirited, shrewd, thorough understanding of its times, shows us exactly what that cost its subject" - Telegraph

"Thrilling... Pim's detective work, untangling Roth's tortured (sometimes maddening) contradictions, is enormously impressive, and his analysis of Roth's work is incisive and sometimes revelatory. But what really drives this biography is Pim's deep sympathy for Roth, which he sustains without ever glamorising or sentimentalising his subject" - Literary Review

"Thankfully, with Endless Flight, we finally have an English language biography of Roth. And biographer Pim is worthy of the mammoth task at hand, chronicling the complex story of Roth's ultimately tragic life with sensitivity, intelligence, and some serious and revelatory research... an important biography" - Big Issue

"Pim's... effort to understand the man in full is profound and the result feels definitive. His research empowers him to be rigorously sceptical... Pim steadily builds the case that Roth's vagabond life - he lived out of three suitcases and was happiest in hotels - was his animating paradox" - The Guardian

"Keiron Pim... brings all the details of this consistently creative but wretched life together in an engrossing fashion, giving all the historical context we might need... His analysis of Roth's novels is clear and convincing, clear of any fanciful conjecture" - The Irish Times

"Deeply considered, rigorously researched and brimming with fascinating details and insights, it situates the man and his work in their wider political and social context, ably showing how Roth "drew from his multiple traumas to create works that endure owing to their conscience, percipience [and] ironic humour"" - Financial Times

"Pim's masterstoke is to view Roth first and foremost as a writer... Pim is scrupulous in his research and fair in his assessments, but he goes beyond observing such biographer's duties... The further Pim delves, the richer the picture becomes" - Prospect

"Vivid... convincing... It is Keiron Pim's substantial achievement in Endless Flight to have shown us the magnitude of Roth's struggle in a turbulent era that has alarming parallels with our own" - TLS

"Really sympathetic and gets [Roth's] contradictions... Couldn't be more relevant" - BBC Radio 4 Front Row

"Pim is particularly good on Roth's Jewishness... A dark story, movingly told" - Jewish Chronicle

"Timely... Keiron Pim's is the first English-language biography of Roth, and what a superb book it is - impeccably researched, extremely readable and, it must be said, grimly relevant... Unfailingly well-written and informative, Endless Flight is a grand tribute to one of the most discomfiting literary geniuses of the 20th century" - Observer

"With the publication of Keiron Pim's Endless Flight, it's as if the shutters have been flung open and the lights switched on. English readers finally have a comprehensive, detailed and supremely empathetic account of Roth's whole life, researched with breathtaking thoroughness and told with a transparency and a compassion worthy of Roth's own writing... A masterly and moving biography, and anyone interested in the fate of European culture in the 20th century will want to read it. And then, as with Roth's own work, to return and re-read it in mounting gratitude, pity and wonder" - The Critic

"Capably carried out" - Spectator

"A fitting account of one of Europe's great, troubled literary geniuses" - New European

"Richly detailed, insightful and compendious, this biography supplies all the information on Roth's tormented, rootless, inebriated life: good and bad, noble and shameful. We have the work - now we have the man. A great deal is explained and clarified as a result" - TLS

"Reading Pim's sparkling, effervescent study of Roth's life, it seems his gifts flourished not in spite of his suffering but because of it" - Oldie

"Keiron Pim is a determined, persistent biographer. There are no easy subjects in his eye; instead, he focuses on figures we know little about, who we want to know more about, and then, in a meticulous, no-stone-unturned pursuit of their lives, tells us a fascinating story about even more fascinating characters" - Eastern Daily Press

"Keiron Pim joins Roth on his rackety grand European tour and with him recaptures that age" - The Times