After 80 years, Darkness at Noon's original text is finally translated

Arthur Koestler’s classic story of Stalinist purges has hitherto been known through an incomplete translation by his girlfriend – until a student found the original in an archive

When it was first published in 1940, Arthur Koestler’s dystopian indictment of Stalinism, Darkness at Noon, was hailed as a seminal work. The bestselling story of a once-powerful Soviet revolutionary, who is arrested and tried for treason by the regime he helped establish, was deemed “a piece of brilliant literature” by George Orwell. Today it is regarded as one of the works that alerted the west to the realities of Stalin’s regime and is one of the most celebrated political novels of the 20th century.

Now, almost 80 years later, the Hungarian-British author’s original text is being published in English for the first time after a German student discovered a carbon copy that had been lost since 1940.

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