"Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution...

"When Ettie's husband dies, her daughter, Iza, insists that she give up the family house in the countryside and move to Budapest. Displaced from her community and her home, Ettie tries to find her place in this new life. Iza's Ballad is the story of a woman who loses her life's companion and a mother trying to get close to a daughter whom she has never truly known. It is about the meeting of the old-fashioned and the modern worlds and the beliefs...

A rediscovered masterwork from the famed Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage is in fact a startling exploration of a triangle of entanglement.
A wealthy couple in bourgeois society, Peter and Ilonka appear to enjoy a fine union. Their home is tastefully decorated; their clothes are well tailored; they move in important circles. And yet, to hypersensitive Ilonka, her choice in décor is never good enough,...

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Auslñder is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find...

Through intimate camera work, the film immerses the viewer in the worlds of two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata, a middle-aged factory worker who wants to have a child with her married lover, and Anna, a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women2s lives, as each navigates the realities...

"Set in an isolated hamlet, Satantango unfolds over the course of a few rain-soaked days. Only a dozen inhabitants remain in the bleak village, rank with the stench of failed schemes, betrayals, failure, infidelity, sudden hopes, and aborted dreams. At the center of Satantango is the eponymous drunken dance."--P. [i].

A Jew's lament to explain why he has not fathered a child: after the Holocaust it is impossible for a Jew to have a normal life. But as his lament continues it becomes clear the roots of his nihilism lie in his childhood. By a Hungarian writer, author of Fateless.

“When telling one’s life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself,” Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling. Taking his firmly embedded memories―the “shimmering details” that...

A literary sensation in Hungary now available in English, György Spiró's masterwork is at once a gripping page-turner, a magiterial historical epic, and a riotous road novel. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., Captivity recounts the adventures of Uri, a bookish, hapless young Roman Jew.