“Gustav had been given the first name of the German carter who had picked him up in a crib abandoned on the side of a road. This had happened outside the small town of Ellingen, hence the surname. On the child’s coat a note had been pinned that here was a Jewish baby, to be delivered to the Waisenhaus in Nuremberg.”

Based on his mother’s extraordinary family history, David Pryce-Jones’s fierce multigenerational novel chronicles one of the Habsburg Empire’s richest and most powerful Jewish families—a family, the Ellingens, whose rise and fall coincides with the terrible graph of twentieth century European history. Thanks to boundless talent and ambition, Gustav ascends from the poverty and obscurity of an orphanage to the pinnacle of Viennese society, winning a barony despite his origins. Like the Wittgensteins and other glittering peers of Jewish backgrounds, the philanthropic and increasingly bohemian Ellingens survive the defeat of the Central Powers, the Russian Revolution, the inflation of Weimar, and the Great Depression.

On the Baron’s death, his only child, Henriette, married to a man of culture whose sexuality only slowly becomes clear, must take control of a family empire threatened with collapse. Jules, her only child, raised at an English boarding school, will have to face a far more terrible challenge in the rise of Nazism. The Afternoon Sun is storytelling at its best, a portrait of four brilliant generations of Ellingens and their Europe by peerless observer who knew them as few other could. “Strength of will proves to be Gustav’s real legacy to his family,” Booklist wrote, “far outlasting his mansion, industries, and gold.”