Masquerade

New York: Carrick & Evans, Inc.. Good+. (c.1939). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [ex-rental library book, indicated as such by the "Bullock's Book Club" pocket mounted to the rear pastedown with two strips of (yellowing) tape; moderately worn, binding still fully intact, some fading to spine cloth, some soiling to edges of text block, slight exposure of boards at bottom corner of front cover]. Politcally-infused novel set in the mid-1930s about an expatriate couple, a Hungarian woman and her Austrian husband (the latter a journalist/satirist with a somewhat radical background), who hook up in Rome with a handsome young German doctor (possibly a Nazi spy, who eventually exhibits a rather keen interest in the Austrian's politics). The three of them head off on an alcohol-fueled tour of Northern Italy, during which romantic-triangular things happen. (One contemporary reviewer summed it up as "fundamentally the story of two very jealous men and one very pretty girl.") The author was himself a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, where he had been a freelance journalist; this was the first of apparently only two novels written by him in English. .