The Radetzky March, By Joseph Roth

Michael Hofmann's dazzling recent translations have secured a place for Roth, that peerless celebrant and satirist of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the affections of an army of Anglophone readers.

This re-issue of his 1932 masterpiece - in Hofmann's galloping prose - should enlist another phalanx of fans. It traces, via the Trotta family's fate, the bittersweet decline of the empire from Moravia via Vienna to Galicia.

Roth weds epic sweep and scope to irony, pathos and keen wit, sustained across glorious set-pieces.