Although now overshadowed by Kafka’s success, Brod was an accomplished and prolific author in his own right. This novel is set in the spa town of Teplitz (Teplice) and is a cameo of he lives of prosperous Jewish families before the First World War. It draws a compelling and poignant picture of the normal everyday lives of its characters, so touchingly unaware of the traumas to come in the following decades when their communities would be shattered beyond repair.

In Vice, Virtue and Poverty, a desperately poor young girl decides to surrender her virtue in order to relieve her family from cold and hunger. But rescue comes from an unexpected quarter. The Gentleman Beggar portrays the fate of a nobleman who has squandered two fortunes and is reduced to poverty, but finds an unlikely benefactor in a former servant. In A Lamb between Two Wolves, a guardian uncle, driven by unbridled greed and wickedness, finds ingenious ways to turn his nephew, a young and healthy heir to a large fortune, into a dying wastrel.

In The Wild Junker the eponymous hero returns from five years of travelling abroad to find that his childhood sweetheart has given up waiting for him and is engaged to another. And in You Have to be Lucky! the hero meets the love of his life minutes after proposing a ‘marriage of convenience’ to a neighbour’s daughter.