The novel Embers is selling in tens of thousand in a number of countries. The memoir of its author depicts Hungary between 1944 and 1948.
Sándor Márai Books
April 11, 1900 – February 21, 1989
Sándor Márai was a Hungarian writer and journalist celebrated for his precise and clear realist style. His works, predominantly novels, delve into themes of nostalgia for lost worlds and critiques of political regimes. Márai's distinctive voice and his ability to capture the complexities of Central European identity establish him as a significant figure in 20th-century literature, with his writings valued for their depth and enduring relevance.
A rediscovered masterwork from famed Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage tracks the lifelong entanglement of a man and two women haunted by class differences and misdirected longings. Peter and Ilonka are a wealthy couple whose outwardly perfect marriage is undone by secrets. The insecure Ilonka believes she can never be elegant and refined enough for her husband, while Peter has long been tormented by his forbidden love for Judit, a peasant and servant in his childhood home. What Judit longs for most, however, is freedom from the constraints of the society that has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss. Set against the backdrop of Hungary between the wars, in a world on the verge of dramatic change, this exquisite novel offers further posthumous evidence of Marai’s brilliance. Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
Embers
- 256 pages
- 9 hours of reading
As darkness settles on a forgotten castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, two men sit down to a final dinner together. They have not seen one another in forty-one years. At their last meeting, in the company of a beautiful woman, an unspoken act of betrayal left all three lives shattered - and each of them alone. Tonight, as wine stirs the blood, it is time to talk of old passions and that last, fateful meeting.
What is it like to be in love with a pathological liar and fantasist? Esther is, and has been for more than 20 years. "Esther's Inheritance" presents a remarkable narrator who delivers a story as both tragedy and comedy.
It is midnight, October 31st 1758 and Giacomo Casanova has escaped from a Venetian prison after sixteen months consigned to darkness and the underworld. Shaking off the enforced solitude, Casanova makes his way to Bolzano - the small village where he was dealt a cruel hand.
The Rebels
- 288 pages
- 11 hours of reading
It is May 1918, and a group of boys are poised on the brink of adulthood. With war sweeping Europe, theirs has become a ghost town: fathers, uncles and older brothers have been called to the front; the trains that arrive through snow-capped mountains bear the living with the dead. As the boys’ graduation looms, so too does their fear of going to fight. Drawn together by the end of all that is familiar, yet repelled by what adulthood has come to represent, a small group of them invent a clandestine world. In their hideaway, with its codes, loves, jealousies, and own elaborate rules, these four test out their frustrations and their fears. Their games are darkly comic, wildly imaginative, increasingly subversive, and they attract the attention of a visitor to the town. By summer’s end, their secret is in ruins. The Rebels is a story of complicity and betrayal, of youthful exuberance and dawning responsibility. Another rediscovered gem from the great Hungarian author of Embers, it is a haunting novel that traces the experience of friends who confuse growing up with dying and adulthood with war, and are jolted forever from the final, irretrievable summer of their adolescence. ‘Elegiac, sombre, musical, and gripping, Embers is a brilliant disquisition on friendship' Observer
Tagebücher 1984 - 1989
- 154 pages
- 6 hours of reading
Die Tagebücher Sándor Márais von 1984 bis zu seinem Freitod 1989 sind ein überaus bewegendes Zeugnis. Ohne zu beschönigen, beschreibt der Schriftsteller Krankheit und Tod seiner geliebten Frau, mit der er sechzig Jahre seines Lebens verbracht hatte. Er hält den Prozeß des eigenen Alterns fest, berichtet von der zunehmenden Einsamkeit, auch wenn er nach wie vor an den gesellschaftlichen und literarischen Ereignissen seiner Zeit Anteil nimmt.
