Krisztina Tóth: The Monkey’s Eyes
Krisztina Tóth’s latest novel is set in a bleak city in the bleakest of times. The scene is an isolated country that has recently been through a devastating civil war. The new government rules with an iron hand and society is fatally divided. More
Árpád Kun: Molly Male
Medárdus has emigrated from Hungary to Norway, where he lives with his wife and three children, with a fourth on the way. He makes his living as a carer in an old people’s home and as a home help: his day’s work done, he is able to devote himself to bringing up his children in ideal circumstances. More
Réka Mán-Várhegyi: Sketch for Something Else
Magdi has uncontrollable bursts of anger, Ági has 10,000 followers, Györgyi has a husband with a career in politics, Anikó is having difficulties writing her novel. Réka Mán-Várhegyi’s book consists of four long short-stories offering a glimpse into the everyday life of four middle-class Hungarian women in their forties in the time of the pandemic. More
Judit Kováts: Children of the Tatra Mountains
Judit Kováts’s previous book, Expelled, concerned the fate of the German minorities expelled from Slovakia after World War II, seen through the story of Lilli Hartmann, a girl from Kežmarok (Hungarian Késmárk, German Käsmark). Children of the Tatra Mountains finds Lilli on a liner on her way to the United States with her new family: her husband, an adopted son, and a book of legends of the Tatras. More
Boldizsár Fehér: No Big Deal
How can we dodge wasting time chatting on the street with someone we barely know? What should we do if we don’t like a present we have been given? Why does the barber always cut our hair shorter than we want? More
Krisztián Grecsó: Something Folksy
In Grecsó’s new collection, many of the stories are born of the tension and confusion resulting from the meeting of two worlds. In some of the stories, these two worlds are the city and the village; in others, it is the present and the past. And, importantly, there is the world of the healthy and that of the sick. The severe illness from which the author has only recently recovered is a theme or motif in many of the stories. More
Edina Szvoren: Sentences on Wonderment
Edina Szvoren’s fifth collection of distinctive short stories maintains the uniformly high standard of writing that we have come to expect from her. This volume nonetheless differs from the previous ones in that here the keynote of its unmistakably grotesque, absurd style is more playful, more humorous, and more light-hearted than in her earlier work. More
Gábor Schein: Oh, Rhinoceros
Gábor Schein’s new book is an entertainment: it imagines what would happen were the history of Europe and western civilization told by rhinoceroses. The story begins with Europa being carried away not by a bull but by a rhino, and ends with the anti-rhino media spreading the news that the source of the epidemic – patient zero, as it were – was an Indian rhinoceros that was not prepared to quarantine. More
Anna T. Szabó: Exercises in Escapology
This is a book of love and death: Anna T. Szabó’s third collection of short stories is concerned with the body and the soul, with yearning and infatuation, with joy and the lack of it, with the glorious yet terrifying forces that inhabit human beings, with how we yield to – or rein in – our desires. The forty stories almost all concern the lives and fates of women, from teenagers to the elderly. More
Tibor Noé Kiss: Unfathomable Landscape
Following a car crash a young woman in her twenties falls into a coma. When he is not by her sickbed her father spends his time investigating the causes of the accident. On an estate near the motorway there live a brother and sister: though in adjacent rooms, they might as well be on two different continents. These four characters are the protagonists of the book and at the same time the story’s narrators. More
Noémi Kiss: Balaton
A hot summer’s day in the 1980s by Lake Balaton. A little girl is being taught how to swim by her grandfather. When they get out of the water, they find a corpse among the reeds. Like in all of Noémi Kiss’s powerful stories about the Balaton, aka ‘the Hungarian sea’, the excitement of discovering new things mingles with the unsettling emotion of anxiety. More
Géza Bereményi: A Hungarian Copperfield
A memoir of the author’s childhood and teenage years, Géza Bereményi’s book is a fascinating chronicle of post-war Hungary, taking in the 1956 revolution and the consolidation of the communist regime in the stifling 1960s. More
Judit Szaniszló: The Life of Leli
Leli browses among family photos and sets about describing them. The result is a family novel, or rather, fragments of a family novel, composed of chunks of memory. As the family photos are detailed, the past, narrated in the present tense, comes alive. More
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