The first volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography chronicles the childhood, adolescence and youth of the later famous author. Koestler guides the reader through the remarkable environments of Budapest during the Commune of 1919, Vienna after World War I, where bourgeois societies and Sigmund Freud reigned supreme, and then the newly settled Palestine. She shows him post-war Paris and Berlin during the Weimar Republic, before taking him to the North Pole. Koestler intersperses everything with remarkable reflections, the uncertainties of his childhood and the reflections of mature adulthood. He recounts his intellectual and ideological development in the book - the first volume of his memoirs ends with his joining the Communist Party in late 1931.
Czech edition