Darkness at Noon: A Novel
by Arthur Koestler
from Scribner
Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.
During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation.
A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.
Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
from Bantam
This splendid novel is set in the tumultuous Soviet Union of the 1930s during the treason trials. Rubashov, the protagonist and a hero of the revolution, is arrested and jailed for things he has not done, though there is much about the current Soviet state that veered from his ideals as a revolutionary. His investigators, Ivanov and Gletkin, seek a public confession and interrogate him using a number of methods. Through the ordeal, Rubashov reaches an epiphany or two while his interrogators suffer the cruel fate of the Soviet machine. Darkness at Noon succeeds as political/historical novel, but even more so as a refreshing tale of the human spirit.
Darkness At Noon stands as an  unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare  politics of our time. Its hero is an aging  revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by  the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As  the pressure to confess preposterous crimes  increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the  terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian  movement masking itself as an instrument of  deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of  one man's solitary agony, Darkness At  Noon asks questions about ends and means  that have relevance not only for the past but for  the perilous present. It is--as the  Times Literary Supplement has declared--"A  remarkable book, a grimly fascinating  interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed  of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the  same time a tense and subtly intellectualized  drama..."
Scum of the Earth
by Arthur Koestler
from Eland Books
Reunion
by Fred Uhlman
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Arrival and Departure (20th Century Classics)
by Arthur Koestler
from Penguin Classics
The Case of the Midwife Toad
The Invisible Writing
by Arthur Koestler
from Vintage Books
The second volume is in Koestler’s own words “a typical case history of a member of the educated middle classes of Central Europe in our time.” We see him in Germany, Russia, England, France and Spain, working for the cause he believed in until his eventual break with Communism in 1938. It ends with his escape from Occupied France in 1940 to England, where he found a new home. An epilogue brings the story up to 1953.
The Ghost in the Machine (Arkana)
by Arthur Koestler
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
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