A NEVER BEFORE TRANSLATED CLASSIC OF MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE Key Sales Points ? For readers of SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky and EMBERS by Sandor Marai ? Blecher was hailed as a master by Ionesco, and compared to Kafka and Thomas Mann when Scarred Hearts was published in Germany last year ? The first English language edition of a 20th century European classic It is Paris in the 1930s and Emanuel, a young Romanian student, finds himself dangerously ill with spinal tuberculosis. He is sent to a sanatorium near the French coast where for a year he remains wrapped in a plaster body cast - the conventional treatment for his disease at that time. In the eerie, isolated world of the sanatorium Emanuel discovers that life goes on. He suffers his horrendous cure and his body slowly deteriorates ? but, unexpectedly, he falls in love. This tender, doomed love affair between two patients is at the emotional core of a rare, unforgettable novel that leaves the reader with a fresh understanding of what it means to be human. AUTHOR Max Blecher was born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Romania. At the age of 19, he contracted tuberculosis of the spine and spent the rest of his life in hospitals and sanatoria. Scarred Hearts, his second and last novel, appeared in 1937, a year before his death at the age of 29. His work, forgotten for many decades, has been republished to great acclaim in recent years.
