Prater Violet is the most charming novel I have read in a long time. –Diana Trilling

Originally published in 1945, Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing an ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features vivid portraits of the imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter–the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.