The Way Back

The sequel to one of the most powerful novels of the First World War and a keystone title on the Vintage Classics list.

Remarque is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank

Erich Maria Remarque (Author) 
 Erich Maria Remarque was a German author and veteran of the First World War. He was born 1898 in Osnabrück, Germany. At the age of 18 he was conscripted into the German army. During his service he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck. Following the war he worked as a primary school teacher, and later as a librarian, a journalist and a technical writer. 
Among Remarque’s published novels were All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, Three Comrades and Arch of Triumph. His works were publicly burned by the Nazi German government, and in 1947 he and his first wife became naturalised citizens of the United States. Four years earlier, his sister had been executed at the behest of Hitler’s ‘People’s Court’. 
 
Remarque adapted the book Ten Days to Die, about Hitler’s final days, as a screenplay, and he also wrote for the stage. His last novel was The Night in Lisbon, published in 1962. During his lifetime Remarque married twice and had love affairs with the actresses Hedy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

The sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the most powerful novels of the First World War and a twentieth-century classic. 
 
After four gruelling years the survivors of the Great War finally make their way home. Young, spirited Ernst is one. Finding himself inexplicably returned to his childhood bedroom, restless, chafing, confused, he knows he must somehow resurrect his life. But the way back to peace is far more treacherous than he ever imagined. If All Quiet on the Western Front was a lament for a lost generation, this sequel speaks with the same resonant voice for those who came back. 
 
The is a new definitive English translation by expert Remarque translator Brian Murdoch. 
 
‘Remarque is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank’ New York Times Book Review

All Quiet on the Western Front

As the centenary of the 1918 Armistice approaches, a hardcover edition of the most famous novel to come out of World War I, drawing on the author's personal experience of trench warfare as a young conscript in the German army.

The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.

All Quiet is that rare thing, a work of popular modernism.

Erich Maria Remarque was a German author and veteran of the First World War. He was born 1898 in Osnabrück, Germany. At the age of 18 he was conscripted into the German army. During his service he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck. Following the war he worked as a primary school teacher, and later as a librarian, a journalist and a technical writer. 
Among Remarque’s published novels were All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back, Three Comrades and Arch of Triumph. His works were publicly burned by the Nazi German government, and in 1947 he and his first wife became naturalised citizens of the United States. Four years earlier, his sister had been executed at the behest of Hitler’s ‘People’s Court’. 
 
Remarque adapted the book Ten Days to Die, about Hitler’s final days, as a screenplay, and he also wrote for the stage. His last novel was The Night in Lisbon, published in 1962. During his lifetime Remarque married twice and had love affairs with the actresses Hedy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

In 1914 Paul Bäumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. On a calm October day in 1918, only a few weeks before the Armistice, Paul will be the last of them to be killed. In All Quiet on the Western Front he tells their story. 
 A few years after it was published in 1929 the Nazis would denounce and publicly burn Remarque's novel for insulting the heroic German army - in other words, for 'telling it like it was' for the common soldier on the front line where any notions of glory and national destiny were soon blasted away by the dehumanizing horror of modern warfare. 
 Remarque has an extraordinary power of describing fear: the appalling tension of being holed up in a dugout under heavy bombardment; the animal instinct to kill or be killed which takes over during hand-to-hand combat. He also has an eye for the grimly comic: the consignment of coffins Paul and his friends pass as they make their way up the line for a new offensive; the young soldiers joyfully tucking into double rations when half their company are unexpectedly wiped out. 
 Remarque's elegy for a sacrificed generation is all the more devastating for the laconic prose in which his teenaged veteran narrates shocking experiences which for him have become the stuff of daily life. Paul cannot imagine a life after the war and can no longer relate to his family when he returns home on leave. Only the camaraderie of his diminishing circle of friends has any meaning for him. He comes especially to depend on an older comrade, Stanislaus Katczinsky, and one of the most poignant moments in the book is when he carries the wounded Kat on his back under fire to the field dressing station, with starkly tragic outcome. 
 The saddest and most compelling war story ever written.

The Promised Land

The final, previously unpublished novel by the author of All Quiet on the Western Front - a dreamlike, powerfully moving account of an emigrant's experience of New York during World War II

Remarque died before he could complete The Promised Land, but the four hundred pages he produced, superbly translated by the redoubtable Michael Hofmann, are enough to tell a fascinating and poignant tale about identity, adaptability and the trials of starting afresh

The Promised Land has been both beautifully penned and thoughtfully translated… The Promised Land is a compulsively readable, and rather marvellous historical novel

A moving and compelling story...thoughtful reflection on the inhumanity of warfare and the emigrant's predicament, deft characterisation, colourful accounts of life in New York during World War II...readers will readily engage with the rich detail and sympathetic portrayal

Erich Maria Remarque was born in 1899. He fought and was injured in the trenches in the First World War when he was eighteen years old. He was exiled and his works were burnt by the Nazis. He lived in America and Switzerland and married and divorced his first wife twice before marrying the celebrated Hollywood actress Paulette Goddard. He published several novels after All Quiet on the Western Front, the most famous of which is The Road Back. He died in 1970.

The final, previously unpublished novel by the author of All Quiet on the Western Front - a dreamlike, powerfully moving account of an emigrant's experience of New York during World War II. 
 
 From the detention centre on Ellis Island, Ludwig Somner looks across a small stretch of water to the glittering towers of New York, which whisper seductively of freedom after so many years of wandering through a perlious, suffering Europe. 
 
Remarque's final novel, left unfinished at his death, tells of the precarious life of the refugee – life lived in hotel lobbies, on false passports, the strange, ill-assorted refugee community held together by an unspeakable past. For Somner, each new luxury - ice cream served in drugstores, bright shop windows, art, a new suit, a new romance - has a bittersweet edge. Memories of war and inhumanity continue to resurface even in this peaceful promised land.

A BBC Radio Drama

A BBC Radio 3 full-cast dramatisation of one of the greatest war novels of all time.

A full-cast dramatisation of one of the greatest war novels of all time. 
 
First published as a novel in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of a group of young German soldiers who are enduring, and then coming to terms with, the realities of the First World War. 
 
At the age of 19, following the outbreak of the First World War, Paul Bäumer enlists in the German Army. He is deployed to the Western Front, where the experience of life and death in the trenches has an enormous effect on him. He begins to feel disconnected from his past life: his family, his love of poetry, and his feelings. As the war progresses, Paul becomes increasingly lost in battle. 
 
Haunting yet comic, lyrical yet desperate, the novel became a bestseller on its original publication. It inspired an Oscar-winning film of the same name, and has been adapted for television and stage. This powerful radio dramatisation stars Robert Lonsdale as Paul Bäumer, with a supporting cast including Simon Trinder, Stephen Critchlow, Carolyn Pickles and Malcolm Tierney.

Erich Maria Remarque

Brian Murdoch

Its extraordinary appeal may stem from Remarque&rsquo;s success in universalising the soldiers&rsquo; experience &mdash; that the war was the same for all who fought

[A] masterpiece&hellip; For the first time a writer gave a raw, pitiless account of men killing each other, by any means possible&hellip; its unrelenting honesty makes it hard to read it as anything else

The most famous anti-war novel ever written. 
 
In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches. 
 
'Remarque's evocation of the horrors of modern warfare has lost none of its force' The Times 
 
TRANSLATED BY BRIAN MURDOCH 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition. 
 
All Quiet on the Western Front, BAFTA and Oscar winner, 2023

Erich Maria Remarque

Praise for All Quiet on the Western Front

Its extraordinary appeal may stem from Remarque’s success in universalising the soldiers’ experience — that the war was the same for all who fought

[A] masterpiece… For the first time a writer gave a raw, pitiless account of men killing each other, by any means possible… its unrelenting honesty makes it hard to read it as anything else

Books by Erich Maria Remarque

Series by Erich Maria Remarque

Against War8 Books

All Quiet on the Western Front2 Books

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics169 Books

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