Purchase
BACKGROUND FOR LOVE
By: Helen Wolff
Pushkin Press Classics
May 2025
On Sale: May 6, 2025
256 pages
ISBN: 1805330748
EAN: 9781805330745
Kindle: B0CYPN1GFW
Trade Paperback / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Fiction
In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover leave 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Côte d'Azur. As they drive along stunning bays, linger over sumptuous meals and steal kisses on the street, they seem marvelously in sync, each enchanted by the other. But as she observes her lover's wandering eye and rigid world-view, the woman decides to leave in search of a cottage of her own near Saint-Tropez. There, amid the vineyards and lemon trees, she will forge startling new connections and pass an unforgettable summer of independence and freedom.
Background for Love is an irresistible autobiographical novel by the great publisher Helen Wolff, who together with her husband, Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s first publisher, set up Pantheon Books in America after fleeing Nazi Germany. In the fascinating companion essay, historian Marion Detjen, the author's great-niece, delves into Helen's path to writing and the autobiographical context of the novel in her early life with Kurt. Helen is remembered as a great publisher, a multilingual reader who brought authors such as Italo Calvino and Georges Simenon to English-speaking readers – only now is her own reputation as a writer coming to the fore.
Recently recovered from the archive and translated for the 1st time by Tristram Wolff, the author's grandson, this is a a fast-paced, highly intense, and emotionally gripping novel of passion and self-discovery.
| 
© 2003-2026