The Radetzky March charts the history of the Trotta family through three generations spanning the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Through the Battle of Solferino to the entombment of the last Hapsburg emperor, Roth's intelligent compassion illuminates the crumbling of a way of life.

Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, the secret returns to haunt her.

Roithamer has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. This work talks about the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion of the negation of his own soul.

On a cruiseship bound for Buenos Aires, a passenger challenges the world chess champion to a match. He accepts with a sneer. The chess board is surrounded. At first, the challenger crumbles before the mind of the master. But then, a voice begins to whisper suggestions. The speaker is wholly unknown. But somehow, he is also entirely formidable.

In 1958, in a small Devon village, two children, playing in a boat on the river, are drowned. Their parents are distraught but remain in the village, living together yet estranged, for the next thirty years. Over time their tragedy becomes part of the invisible fabric of village life until, one summer's day, Anna arrives.

Shows how actions of the present are determined by thoughts of the past.