"With this novel, Fontane achieved his first true masterpiece. It has a perfect beginning, a perfect ending, and no superfluous sentence in between.."

Henry Garland, Editor of The Oxford Companion to German Literature

It has taken a long time for the greatest German 19th-century novelist to find an English-language following. Peter James Bowman's masterly new translation of Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888) offers the English reader another unforgettable novel by Fontane to set beside Effi Briest.

The story: What might have been a simple tale of conflict between love and duty becomes, in Fontane's hands, something more sophisticated. In 1870s Berlin, an aristocratic officer in a glamorous cavalry regiment and a seamstress supporting herself and her invalid foster-mother with piecework defy convention by falling seriously in love.

The contrast between the lovers' whole-hearted view of each other and the world's trivializing view of their relationship underlies a tautly sprung narrative which is tenderly moving without being sentimental; gently ironic and full of social comedy. Fontane's brilliant use of dialogue creates a vigorous and loving portrait of the new German capital and its inhabitants.

THE TRANSLATOR: Peter James Bowman is an independent scholar and translator; he is the author of a number of articles on Fontane and, most recently, The Fortune Hunter: A German Prince in Regency England (2010), a biography of the celebrated Prussian landscape architect and matrimonial adventurer Hermann von P�ckler-Muskau (2010). He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.