The ugly heroine of the love-story Brigitta makes a barren corner of the Hungarian plains bloom. Limestone tells of a repressed priest whose single erotic encounter determines his behaviour for the rest of his life. Abdias is the epic, Job-like story of a Jew raised in the North African desert and driven out into the harsh world by his father at an early age. The hero of The Forest Path, another product of an alienated childhood, is a comic counterpart to the tragic Brigitta; this story is here translated into English for the first time.

Stifter, like Kafka, has a modern appeal in that his narration is as much a veil as a window; the reader, like the characters, must learn how to see.