The guests of a small boarding house on the French Riviera are shaken when a woman who has everything abruptly abandons her wealthy husband and two children. Amidst the turmoil that erupts among the boarding house guests, the figure of the narrator stands out, fiercely defending the wayward woman, whom he has never met. And what brings another guest, an elderly, unmarried woman from England, to invite this man to her room, to reveal to him dramatic events that occurred in her life in one day, a generation earlier, and turned her world upside down for half a century? Even given fifty guesses, the reader will not be able to imagine the answer that Zweig will fire at him from his pen-like submachine gun. In "Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman," the Jewish-Austrian master of storytelling twists our guts countless times, and he does so not only through the surprises he pulls out of a veritable magic hat, but also by making full use of his unique talent for extracting from pure emotion a distilled essence of words, capturing in ink the most primal recesses of the soul, the most elusive to describe. This is the greatness of Zweig, who, in one short story, folds an entire life of missed opportunities, regret, and self-judgment, and as if by chance throws the reader into personal introspection, offering him invaluable therapy: catharsis.