A haunting journey through frozen landscapes
Two stories of quest – one set in the frozen expanse of the taiga in Siberia, the other in a Hungarian village among long-buried memories – intertwined by the love and longing of husband and wife for one another.
Set in the spring of 2019, the novel’s protagonist and narrator is a woman in her thirties who previously worked as a social worker and has begun a new life with her husband, a cultural anthropologist, in a village in southern Hungary. While her husband returns to Siberia to conduct research among the Khanty – where he encounters an unexpected and dramatic situation – her everyday life is thrown into turmoil by the death of her grandmother. As she worries for her husband, who has been out of contact for days, she also prepares for the funeral where she will confront her violent and abusive father, who had been imprisoned for murder. Meanwhile, her relationship with her mother gradually unfolds. As memories and images of the past keep surfacing, she slowly pieces together the mosaics of her own history. Interwoven with her inner monologue is the field diary her husband keeps in Siberia, which partly revolves around the mysterious disappearance of a woman.
The title is metaphorical: it alludes to a thawing out of relationships with the closest relatives frozen in ice and the possibility of some kind of transformation; but at the same time, among the Khanty (the closest linguistic relatives of Hungarians) it is the thaw that brings to the surface the dead who have lain under the snow for weeks – and, in the longer run, the force that will reshape the entire region and eventually erase it.
Tibor Noé Kiss works with a collage-like technique. He starts from images – inner states, associations, moments frozen to infinity, fragments of memory – that he strings together in such a way that their sequence gives rise to the story. The novel’s greatest power lies in its evocative atmosphere.
Product details
ISBN 978 963 1445 60 2
2025, hard cover with jacket
320 pages
5999 HUF
“I step into the circle of light. My father is standing somewhere in the darkness, watching me.”
Magvető Rights 
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