Discover Vienna Through Books

 

Find the Best Books Set in Vienna – Vienna is not only a city of palaces, cafés, and concert halls, but one of the great literary capitals of Europe. From the twilight of the Habsburg Empire to the trauma of fascism and exile, writers from Vienna have explored identity, art, and memory with extraordinary intensity.

 

Reading Vienna’s literature today offers more than historical insight: it sharpens our understanding of contemporary Europe. For visitors, these books transform the city into a living text—its coffeehouses, museums, and public parcs becoming charged with stories that deepen your walk through Vienna and make the past feel urgently present. Together, these books invite readers to experience Vienna not just as a destination, but as a place shaped by its literature.

 

Explore books set in Austria beyond Vienna.

Read more about Austrian literary tradition: Austria in Books.

Discover books set in Berlin.

Explore books set in Prague.

The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard

 

In this essay, French author Vuillard drops you into the charged streets and squares of Vienna and backroom manoeuvres of the Anschluss, where intimidation and propaganda tighten their grip hour by hour. A sharp, unsettling snapshot of how history can be engineered in plain sight.

• Setting: Vienna, Berlin, Berchtesgaden, London
• Year of publication: 2017
• Original title: L’Ordre du jour
• 144 pages
• Winner of the Prix Goncourt

Read the full book page: The Order of the Day

 

The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler

 

Set in Vienna on the eve of catastrophe, this coming-of-age tale follows Franz from a tobacconist’s counter into the city’s parks and cabarets—where even Sigmund Freud becomes part of his education. As 1938 arrives, the warmth of everyday Vienna gives way to fear, making the city’s transformation heartbreakingly vivid.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 2012
• Original title: Der Trafikant
• 234 pages

Read the full book page: The Tobacconist

 

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

 

From grand apartments to confiscated lives, de Waal’s memoir lingers in Vienna and Paris between 1870 and 1938, tracing the Ephrussi family’s brilliance and the brutal unravelling of their world. At its centre is the family’s love for art and its collection of netsuke—Japanese miniature sculptures.

• Setting: Vienna, Paris and Tokyo
• Year of publication: 2010
• Original title: The Hare with Amber Eyes
• 353 pages

Read the full book page: The Hare with Amber Eyes

 

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh

 

In early twentieth-century Vienna, the Wittgensteins live at the intersection of immense wealth, music, art, and private tragedy—an extraordinary Jewish-Austrian family in an extraordinary city.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 2008
• Original title: The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
• 384 pages

Read the full book page: The House of Wittgenstein

 

Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavinic

 

In Vienna in 1910, a world-championship chess match becomes a portrait of ambition, anxiety, and the city’s coffeehouse culture that made chess a way of life.

• Setting: Vienna, Berlin, Budapest
• Year of publication: 1998
• Original title: Carl Haffners Liebe zum Unentschieden
• 186 pages
• Notable: The author, Thomas Glavinic, was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literature.

Read the full book page: Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw

 

The Battle by Patrick Rambaud

 

Just outside Vienna in 1809, French author Rambaud throws you into the mud, smoke, and confusion of Napoleon’s first major defeat on a European battlefield. It’s historical fiction with the pace and grit of lived experience, anchored in Vienna’s outskirts.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1997
• Original title: La bataille
• 320 pages
• Notable: Winner of the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française.

Read the full book page: The Battle

 

Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

 

For decades, Reger retreats to a single room in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, staring at a Tintoretto painting while unleashing blistering complaints about culture, society, and the city itself. Beneath the tirades, Vienna becomes a place where obsession, grief, and survival quietly coexist.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1985
• Original title: Alte Meister
• 256 pages
• Notable: The author, Thomas Bernhard, was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize.

Read the full book page: Old Masters

 

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

 

A funeral draws a writer back to Vienna, and a dinner party among the city’s cultural elite becomes an evening-long reckoning—acidic, funny, and painfully precise. Bernhard turns Vienna into a claustrophobic salon of artists and egos, where every courtesy hides a wound.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1984
• Original title: Holzfällen
• 192 pages
• Notable: The author, Thomas Bernhard, was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize.

Read the full book page: Woodcutters

 

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

 

In Vienna’s musical world, Jelinek follows a conservatory teacher whose pursuit of control and escape curdles into a disturbing relationship with a student. The city’s proud cultural façade—practice rooms, ambition, discipline—becomes the setting for something raw and unsettling.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1983
• Original title: Die Klavierspielerin
• 288 pages
• Notable: The author, Elfriede Jelinek, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Read the full book page: The Piano Teacher

 

Last Waltz in Vienna by George Clare

 

Beginning at a first ball in Vienna’s Konzerthaus in February 1938, Clare’s memoir captures the last shimmer of normality before the Anschluss shatters everything. Vienna is rendered with aching immediacy: a beloved home turning dangerous in a matter of days.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1981
• Original title: Last Waltz in Vienna
• 288 pages
• Notable: Winner of the WH Smith Literary Award.

Read the full book page: Last Waltz in Vienna

 

Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes by Friedrich Torberg

 

Through tragicomic anecdotes, Torberg resurrects Jewish Vienna between the wars—its coffeehouses, characters, and sharp-edged wit—especially around places like Café Herrenhof. It’s a portrait of a city’s vanished social world, told with affection and bite.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1975
• Original title: Die Tante Jolesch oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten
• 240 pages
• The author, Friedrich Torberg, was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literature.

Read the full book page: Tante Jolesch

 

Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann

 

In Vienna, Bachmann’s narrator moves through love, memory, and a male-dominated world that feels both intimate and hostile. The city’s streets and rooms become part of her psychological landscape, as haunting as they are precise.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1971
• Original title: Malina
• 283 pages
• Notable: The author, Ingeborg Bachmann, was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize. The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, a major Austrian literature award, is named in her honour.

Read the full book page: Malina

 

Setting Free the Bears by John Irving

 

In 1967, Vienna is the setting for a darkly comic, reckless plan: free the animals from Schönbrunn Zoo and ride out into Austria on a motorcycle. Irving’s Vienna is post-war, restless, and vividly observed.

• Setting: Vienna and other places in Austria
• Year of publication: 1968
• Original title: Setting Free the Bears
• 416 pages
• The author, John Irving, was awarded the American National Book Award for Fiction.

Read the full book page: Setting Free the Bears

 

The Third Man by Graham Greene

 

In post-war, Allied-occupied Vienna, an American writer arrives to find his friend dead—and discovers a city of shadows, zones, and black-market bargains. Greene makes Vienna feel like a maze of moral compromise, where every street corner has a secret.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1949
• Original title: The Third Man
• 160 pages
• The author, Graham Greene, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize.

Read the full book page: The Third Man

 

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

 

Zweig’s memoir is steeped in Vienna from the late empire through the rise of fascism, capturing the schools, salons, cafés, and cultural confidence of a world about to disappear. If you want to feel Vienna’s lost European soul—its brilliance and its fragility—this is the book.

• Setting: Mainly Vienna, but also Salzburg, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, London, etc.
• Year of publication: 1944
• Original title: Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers
• 472 pages

Read the full book page: The World of Yesterday

 

The Emperor’s Tomb by Joseph Roth

 

When Trotta returns to Vienna in 1918, he finds a capital learning to live without an empire—new rules and a lingering grief for what’s been buried. With the Capuchin Crypt as its symbol, Vienna becomes both setting and elegy.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1938
• Original title: Die Kapuzinergruft
• 128 pages

Read the full book page: The Emperor’s Tomb

 

Auto da Fé (The Blinding) by Elias Canetti

 

In Vienna, a man barricades himself behind his books—until marriage and obsession push him into a grotesque underworld of desperate characters and power games. The city feels like a trapdoor: one wrong step and the comfortable apartment gives way to something feral.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1935
• Original title: Die Blendung
• 464 pages
• Notable: The author, Elias Canetti, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Read the full book page: Auto da Fé (The Blinding)

 

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

 

Though much of the novel ranges across the Austro-Hungarian empire, Vienna hovers as the heart of Roth’s world—an imperial centre whose authority and traditions shape the fate of the Trotta family. It’s a masterful way into Vienna’s nineteenth-century mindset, even when the story strays beyond the city.

• Setting: Vienna (Austria), Moravia (Czech Republic), Brody (Ukraine)
• Year of publication: 1932
• Original title: Radetzky Marsch
• 369 pages

Read the full book page: The Radetzky March

 

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

 

Set in Vienna in 1913, Musil’s vast, witty modernist novel follows a young man through a society full of grand ideas and moral drift on the brink of collapse. Vienna becomes a laboratory of politics, philosophy, and satire—dazzling, demanding, and strangely contemporary.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1930-1943
• Original title: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
• 1130 – 1774 pages

Read the full book page: The Man Without Qualities

 

The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler

 

In Vienna around 1900, Schnitzler immerses you in bourgeois salons and artistic circles, where desire, antisemitism, identity, and modern psychology are debated as intensely as they’re lived. It’s Vienna as conversation, temptation, and social theatre—beautiful and compromising at once.

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1908
• Original title: Der Weg ins Freie
• 278 pages

Read the full book page: The Road to the Open

 

More novels set in Vienna:

 

Some of these will be explored in more detail in future posts.

 

Viennese Romance by David Vogel

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 2012
• Original title: רומן וינאי
• 352 pages

 

Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 2011
• Original title: Сестрата на Зигмунд Фројд
• 266 pages
• Notable: Winner of the EU Prize for Literature.

 

The Lüneberg Variation by Paolo Maurensig

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1997
• Original title: La variante di Lüneburg
• 140 pages

 

Canone Inverso by Paolo Maurensig

• Setting: Vienna, London, Tirol
• Year of publication: 1996
• Original title: Canone inverso
• 202 pages

 

The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson

• Setting: Vienna; London
• Year of publication: 1993
• Original title: The Morning Gift
• 512 pages

 

Alma Mahler, or the Art of Being Loved by Francoise Giroud

• Setting: Vienna (and other places)
• Year of publication: 1988
• Original title: Alma Mahler, ou l’art d’être aimée
• 184 pages

 

Diaries 1898-1902 by Alma Mahler-Werfel

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1963
• Original title: Mein Leben
• 528 pages

 

The Strudlhof Steps by Heimito von Doderer

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1951
• 864 pages
• Notable: The author, Heimito von Doderer, was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature.

 

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand by Franz Werfel

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1941
• Original title: Eine blass-blaue Frauenschrift
• 144 pages
• The author, Franz Werfel, was awarded the Schiller Prize.

 

I Was Jack Mortimer by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1933
• Original title: Ich war Jack Mortimer
• 192 pages
• Notable: the author, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, was awarded the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Prize, and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Literature.

 

Married Life by David Vogel

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1929-1931
• Original title: חיי נישואים
• 501 pages

 

Between Nine and Nine (From Nine to Nine) by Leo Perutz

• Setting: Vienna
• Year of publication: 1918
• Original title: Zwischen neun und neun; Freiheit
• 186 pages