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
Boldizsár Fehér: Blind Monkey
Two Nobel Prize winning scientists announce to the residents of a luxury hotel in Paris that in the next few days they will be taking part in an experiment. The story is told by a young man in his twenties, until recently Hungary’s richest person, but now on the run from the police. He tries to find refuge in the hotel where the curious experiment is taking place. More
Anita Harag: Rather Cool for the Time of the Year
Reading Anita Harag’s stories is a bit like watching an episode from a series that has been going on for many months. Nothing special happens to her characters: they wake up, go to work, visit their relatives. But if we take a closer look, these simple gestures and chores reveal complex relationships and are suffused with pain, desire and loss. More
Sándor Neszlár: A Carpenter’s Stepson
Sándor Neszlár’s book is exciting experimental prose: he writes a sentence for each kilometre he’s run. The novel is a sum of these sentences, brought to life by the runner’s thoughts, now focussed, now wandering freely. The sentences themselves are unusual: they are almost all impersonal, concealing their narrator. A Carpenter’s Stepson is a veiled autobiography that urges the reader, too, to explore the places of their own life, and run through their own sentences. More
Ádám Bodor: Nowhere
Ádám Bodor’s long-awaited new volume comprises seven short stories. The ‘nowhere’ of the title is a place familiar from Bodor’s previous works: the peripheries of Eastern Europe, a land characterized by oppression, misery and absurdity on the one hand, and a kind of fairy-tale magic, strange and powerful emotional ties and natural beauty on the other. More
Pál Závada: Adrift in the Fog
Závada’s new novel focuses on a legendary family at a dramatic moment in history. It is spring 1944, Hitler’s army has just invaded Hungary, and the inheritors of the Manfréd Weiss Works are weighing their chances of survival. More
Krisztián Grecsó: Vera
Krisztián Grecsó, one of the most popular writers in Hungary, has written a beautiful novel. Vera takes place in the city of Szeged, in 1980, against the backdrop of the stuffy world of the final, weary decade of socialism with its overwhelming lies, corruption and nepotism. More
Réka Mán-Várhegyi: Magnet Hill
Réka Mán-Várhegyi’s European Literature Prize winning novel paints a vivid picture of the life of young academics in Hungary at the beginning of the 21st century. But Magnet Hill is much more than a campus novel: through the struggle of the main characters, we glimpse several layers of contemporary Hungarian society, each with their particular milieu, history, prejudices and challenges. More
Judit Kováts: Expelled
Lilli Hartmann, an ethnic German schoolgirl living in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, is one of the more than twelve million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary who were held collectively responsible for World War II. Her story is not only part of a chapter in the history of twentieth-century Europe that has been suppressed for too long, but the story of a refugee, of someone forced by history to leave her homeland, raising questions that are all too timely today. More
Krisztina Tóth: White Wolf
These are stories of trauma, oppression, submission, exclusion, stigma and violence. Many of them tell of painful secrets: childhood abuses, unpunished crimes, lost children – suffering that goes without punishment, apology and forgiveness. More
Edina Szvoren: My Poems
In Edina Szvoren’s fourth short story collection, which carries the deceptive title My Poems, several characters are engaged in writing: stepping outside reality in a way that still keeps them part of it. More
László Szilasi: Luther’s Dogs
Szilasi’s novel narrates the story of the author’s battle with a brain tumor, which started with him losing consciousness during a class he was teaching at the university. As he tries to come to terms with this harrowing experience, he pieces together the various aspects of his life. More
Iván Sándor: The Seventh Day
In Iván Sándor’s new novel, large masses of people are forced to abandon their homes in various parts of Europe. We are in the continent’s sixteenth-century, in the years before the Thirty Years’ War, with Spaniards, Germans, Flemings, Catholics and Protestants maiming and murdering each other on a daily basis. Two young men, Thomas and Jensen, and a girl, Eliz, leave their home in Leiden, for different reasons. More
Dénes Krusovszky: Those We Will Never Be
In 1990, a man crashes his car and dies close to Iowa City. In 2013, a young man wakes up in Budapest after a bitter row with his girlfriend and takes the train to his native town in the eastern part of the country. In 1986, a patient suffering from post-polio syndrome and lying in an iron lung asks his male nurse to record him narrating his life. Gradually, the pieces of the mosaic slowly come together in this slow-paced, beautiful and poignant book, the first novel from Dénes Krusovszky, one of the most significant poets of his generation. More
