El regreso de los exiliados

In the mid-1950s, Vienna, a city in ruins after World War II, has become a strange landscape of crumbling palaces, decadent aristocrats, and people trying to piece together the fragments of a lost existence. The novel follows several exiles, each in very different circumstances, who return to a city painfully rising from its ashes. Kuno Adler, a prominent Jewish scientist, tired of leading a aimless life in the United States, has returned to the laboratory from which he was expelled; Theophil Kanakis, a Greek businessman determined to claim a share of the war spoils; Marie-Theres, a melancholic teenager sent by her parents in the hope that a change of scenery will cure her depression; and Prince Grein, a handsome young man with a now worthless noble title. Against this devastated backdrop unfolds this strikingly vivid postwar story of fallen Austrian aristocrats, unrepentant Nazis, and a culture degraded by violence. With exquisite precision and sensitivity, De Waal portrays a city that, like its inhabitants, seeks to rebuild itself and reclaim its identity. Fascinating and tragic, The Return of the Exiles is a work that captures a moment of Vienna's decline after World War II with the clarity and timelessness of a photograph.