Red Gloves

Eginald Schlattner's debut novel, Der geköpfte Hahn, was a huge success with critics and readers. Employing the same narrative vivacity and a stylistic spectrum that encompasses laconic brevity, grim humour, passion and sensuality, the Transylvanian-born writer now traces the path of a man who finds himself on the wrong side of politics. After the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, Romania, too, intensifies its hunt for "counter revolutionaries". Among those arrested is a young man, a student and budding writer, who should provide information on friends, co-workers, and even his own brother. After months of interrogations and beatings, humiliated and deprived of sleep, he finally succumbs to the pressure and becomes a principal witness for the prosecution.

Torn between loyalty to his upper middle-class origins and the attempt to justify his betrayal, the narrator is haunted in his prison cell by the demons of an era of upheaval, the bailiffs and the bigwigs, the Nazi turncoats and steadfast Christians, the dreamers, poets and yearning girls, all of them symbols of danger and loss.