Theodor Fontane is Germany's Austen, Flaubert and Turgenev rolled into one. Yet he has only recently begun to win a following in the English-speaking world. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers follow their breakthrough version of five-times filmed Effi Briest with a new translation of another late novel, Unwiederbringlich. No Way Back (1891), set in Copenhagen and Schleswig-Holstein on the eve of the Prussian takeover of the territory in 1864.

The story: Affable but unsophisticated Count Holk, of an ancient German Schleswig family, is inspired by a Romantic ballad to leave the modest but comfortable ancestral Schloss where he and his wife Christine have spent an idyllic early married life and build a new, architecturally ambitious, castle by the sea.. He is unaware of how the ballad ends. As a gentleman-in-waiting to a Danish royal princess, he is summoned to a six-month spell of duty in Copenhagen. At the princess's lively, fun-loving court, the rural count falls into beguiling company, and his life begins to spiral out of control.

This multi-layered portrayal of a problematic marriage and a little-known corner of Danish-German history has all Fontane's celebrated qualities: subtly entertaining dialogue, elegance and irony, a tragicomic edge, and a distinctly modern sensibility.

THE TRANSLATORs: HUGH RORRISON's translations of classic modern German plays have been performed at the Almeida and West Yorkshire Playhouse and broadcast on Radio 3 and 4. HELEN CHAMBERS is Professor Emeritus of German, University of St Andrews, and author of a number of books on Fontane and 19th- and 20th-century German literature.