Burning Secret
A New Translation
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3 Months Free + £10 Audible voucher
£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Offer ends on 5 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
Buy Now for £9.03
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Narrated by:
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AI Voice Audrey Ellsworth
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By:
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Stefan Zweig
This title uses virtual voice narration
Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks.
Twelve-year-old Edgar has never known such attention. At a fashionable Austrian spa resort, a sophisticated Baron befriends him with elaborate charm, treating the boy as an equal, promising adventures, filling the void left by Edgar's distant, preoccupied father. For the first time, Edgar feels seen, valued, important.
But the Baron's interest in Edgar is purely instrumental. His real target is Edgar's mother—beautiful, refined, apparently susceptible to flattery from a titled stranger. The boy is merely the key, the excuse for proximity, the cover for increasingly intimate encounters between the Baron and a married woman whose husband remains conveniently in Vienna.
Stefan Zweig's psychologically devastating novella is a masterpiece of compressed intensity—the portrait of innocence confronting betrayal, of a child forced into premature knowledge that scars rather than enlightens. Set in the refined, suffocating atmosphere of pre-World War I Austria, where beautiful surfaces conceal sordid calculations and respectability is merely performance, Burning Secret captures the precise moment when childhood ends—not through gentle education but through trauma, not through maturation but through the discovery that adults lie, that friendship can be theater, that we matter less than we believed.
Some secrets illuminate. Some secrets burn. And some burn so deeply that innocence can never be recovered.
A devastating exploration of manipulation, desire, and the violent end of childhood—from one of the twentieth century's greatest psychological writers.
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