VENETIAN ANGEL

From Somerset Books’ Blue Danube imprint: literature, travel and history.

It is the summer of 1933. Set against a backdrop of of the sparkling Venetian lagoon, young and naïve Irma Lietzen, the pretty and indulged daughter of a Budapest businessman, is being taken to see the world by her parents. They stop for several weeks in Venice, where Aurelian, a young man once employed as Mr Lietzen’s secretary, is given the job of showing Irma the sights. Irma has plans for what this might involve but Aurelian, it seems, has other ideas.
Gatefold black and white paperback

Author and playwright Ferenc Molnár (1878–1952) was one of the pre-eminent literary figures of early 20th-century Hungary. In 1940 he emigrated to the United States, where his play ‘Liliom’ was adapted as the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ‘Carousel’.
Molnár was described by the critic Clara Györgyey as a writer of ‘whimsical and sophisticated drawing-room comedies,’ delivering ‘a synthesis of realism and romanticism, cynicism and sentimentality.’


Annabel Barber, co-author of Blue Guide Rome, is the Blue Guides editor-in-chief.