Background for Love

A heady, rapturous novel of love and self-discovery in the south of France written by famed publisher Helen Wolff, based on her early life with Kurt Wolff __________ 'A fresh, self-confident tone, a distinctive beauty that needn't fear comparison with books by Irmgard Keun or Erich Kästner' Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 'A fast-paced, highly intense, emotionally gripping, autobiographically grounded story' Buchkultur __________ In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover leave 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Côte d'Azur. As they drive along stunning bays, linger over sumptuous meals and steal kisses on the street, they seem marvellously in sync, each enchanted by the other. But as she observes her lover's wandering eye and rigid world-view, the woman decides to leave in search of a cottage of her own near Saint-Tropez. There, amid the vineyards and lemon trees, she will forge startling new connections and pass an unforgettable summer of independence and freedom. Background for Love is an autobiographical novel by the great publisher Helen Wolff, who together with her husband, Kurt Wolff, set up Pantheon Books in America after fleeing Nazi Germany. In the fascinating companion essay, historian Marion Detjen, the author's great-niece, delves into Helen's path to writing and the autobiographical context of the novel in her early life with Kurt. Recently recovered from the archive and translated for the first time by the author's grandson, Tristram Wolff, this is a lushly atmospheric, irresistible novel of passion and self-discovery.

Helen Wolff (1906-1994) was born in Macedonia to a German father and Austro-Hungarian mother. At twenty-one, she went to Munich to apprentice at Kurt Wolff Verlag, now remembered as Kafka's original publisher. She began an affair with Kurt Wolff, whom she would go on to marry. The couple fled Nazi Germany first for France and eventually for the United States, where they arrived almost penniless in 1941. The Wolffs founded a new imprint of Pantheon Books there in 1942. Helen, a gifted linguist who could read in four European languages, published a wide range of significant works by writers including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Georges Simenon and Boris Pasternak. She wrote fiction and plays but always kept her own writing private. Background for Love was first published in Germany in 2020 to wide acclaim.