The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Sort Of, 265pp, £7.99

This novel, set in 1920s Vienna, has been described as a reworking of the Cinderella story, but the post office girl who is its heroine has rather more in common with Eliza Doolittle. Like Eliza, she is transported from a drab life of penny-pinching poverty into a glamorous whirl of wealth and luxury. And like her, she is transformed into an elegant beauty, becoming a huge social success. But there the resemblance ends. Stefan Zweig's theme is the destructive legacy of the Great War. His girl is cast back into the hopeless, shabby environment from which she came - and for which she has now become totally unsuited. Once more she is transformed, this time into an angry, bitter woman, obsessed, as is the book's other main character - a penniless war veteran-by the injustices of her world and her "stolen" youth.

Though Zweig didn't submit it for publication, this novel, which came out in German in 1982 - 40 years after he committed suicide - is in no way inferior to his other works of fiction. It is written with a feverish urgency that makes it utterly compelling from first page to last. There is, in all Zweig's stories, a tinge of melodrama that excludes him from the ranks of the very greatest novelists-but it is also what makes them so exciting.
Miriam Gross