Fear

Stefan Zweig's novella centers on Irene Wagner, a wife and mother who finds her comfortable bourgeois life predictable after eight years of marriage and starts an affair with a rising young pianist. A woman who knows about the affair begins blackmailing her, threatening to tell her husband, and Irene is soon gripped by an agonizing fear. Zweig, the Austrian writer, makes the story a close study of a woman's mind and emotions under that pressure. Its original German title is Angst. The novella has reached the screen several times, in a 1928 silent film directed by Hans Steinhoff, a 1936 version by Victor Tourjansky, and Roberto Rossellini's 1954 film starring Ingrid Bergman.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.