Saint Peter's Snow

At once a hallucinatory mystery tale and a powerful political parable that the Nazis tried to ban

It could have been a common street accident that put Dr. Georg Amberg in the hospital, but for the five weeks his doctors say he has been in a coma, recovering from a brain hemorrhage after being run down by a car, he has memories of a more disturbing nature. What of the violent events in the rural village of Morwede? The old woman threatening the priest with a breadknife, angry peasants with flails and cudgels, Baron von Malchin with a pistol defending his dreams for the Holy Roman Empire-how could Dr. Amberg ignore these? And what of the secret experiment to make a mind-altering drug from a white mildew occurring on wheat-a mildew called Saint Peter's Snow?

Leo Perutz is the author of eleven novels that attracted the admiration of such writers as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges. He was born in Prague in 1882 and lived in Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss, when he fled to Palestine. He returned to Austria in the fifties and died in 1957. Perutz's Master of the Day of Judgment and Little Apple are also available from Pushkin Vertigo.