In the summer of 1936, Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig and his circle of fellow writers, artists, and intellectuals met up for one last prewar reunion in the Belgian seaside resort town of Ostend. In this evocative, insightful narrative, Volker Weidermann offers a fictionalized version of this final summer gathering and the men and women who stood on the brink of the disintegration of the world as they knew it.