The love lives of famous Europeans, as war approaches - from the bestselling author of 1913

'Strikingly original, utterly absorbing' Julia Boyd, author of Travellers in the Third Reich A Financial Times 'Book to Read in 2023' 1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian café for his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin. Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other's homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught butterfly at the end of Verá's bed. Little do they all know, the book burning will soon begin. Love in a Time of Hate skilfully interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in an irresistible journey into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.

"A brilliantly conceived and uniquely different cultural history of the 1930s, written with confident, alluring poise. Fascinating and revelatory" - Trio

"An enthralling and insightful cultural history - one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair" - Washington Post

"Florian Illies's whirling cultural history, Love in a Time of Hate, captures an era of unmatched hedonism ... there's the thrill of discovery on every page" - Daily Telegraph

"The experimental sex lives of the artists and thinkers of the roaring 20s are set against the burgeoning threat of fascism in this wickedly amusing and timely book" - The Observer

"Partly as a result of the book's organising conceit, and Illies's often arch prose style, Love in a Time of Hate achieves something that is really rather impressive - turning the great moral dramas of the 20th century into breathless melodrama." - The Times

"A brilliantly readable and evocative social history ... beginning with the build up to the Great Depression and ending with the outbreak of war, Florian Illies's superb new book explores the complicated personal and creative lives of everyone from Marlene Dietrich and the Mann family to Salvador Dalí, and F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald" - Irish Times

"It takes a skilful hand to arrange these vignettes into a dramatic image of the world slipping into catastrophe ... This erudite history covers much ground" - Spectator

"In a revealing, offbeat slice of cultural history, Florian Illies traces the tangled affairs of Europe's intelligentsia against the backdrop of the rise of fascism ... Illies, a German writer, brings a light touch and conversational style to his mosaic view of a pivotal period ... he astutely weaves these diverse stories into a fluent, widescreen narrative" - Business Post

"Engaging ... Illies immerses us in a stream of gossip and political rumour, in love affairs past and present, somehow carried on amid great personal achievements and terrible folly. There is a Freudian element and no little writerly brilliance in the way Illies asks: what did these people mean by love? ... This, then, was Europe in love" - TLS

"Highly novelistic ... wisecracking ... skilfully composed" - History Today

"A cultural history of some of the 1930s greatest love stories, interwoven with the darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe" - Bookseller

"Love in a Time of Hate invites us to consider that history is as much an accretion of small gestures as it is a catalogue of battles and speeches. At once intimate and epic, this dazzling book illuminates the human desire to seek connection and coherence as the world descends into chaos. A brilliant and imaginative tour de force" - All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

"Set against the relentless rise of Nazi terror, this ingenious narrative evokes the 1930s through the loves, foibles and tragedies of the cultural elite. Strikingly original, utterly absorbing." - Travellers in the Third Reich

"Please do read this book - it is gorgeous. I learned so many new things about love, art and the horror of history" - The Collini Case

"This is candid, unsparing and gripping social history viewed through the prism of two- and three-person relationships - simultaneously disenchanting and endearing. A bravura performance" - Aftermath

"Praise for Florian Illies: 'Illies is as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist" - Guardian

"A vivid, richly textured book that chronicles a world crackling with talent, energy and foreboding" - Financial Times

"An absolute gem of a book" - Observer

"Thorough and fascinating" - Time Out