This is the story of about the strangest thing that I've ever encountered, old art dealer that I am.'

It is perhaps the finest art collection of its kind, acquired through a lifetime of sacrifice - but when a dealer comes to see it, he finds something quite unexpected, and is drawn into a peculiar deception of the collector himself...

Stefan Zweig was a wildly popular writer of compelling short fiction: in this collection there are peaks of extraordinary emotion, stories of all that is human crushed by the movements of history, of letters that fill a young heart or drive a person towards death, of obsession and desire. They will stay with the reader for ever.