.HIGHLIGHTS
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VS by Zsuzsa Rakovszky (Novel, Magvető, 2011, 394 pages)
Closely following the historical facts of the life of one of history’s first documented cases of female-to-male transsexualism in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, this gripping novel recounts the unconventional life and loves of Countess Sarolta Vay, who lived as a successful writer under the name of Sándor Vay, seducing several women and consuming two marriages. Taking the reader on a sentimental journey in time, the prison diaries, love letters and autobiography of V.S. are wowen together in this novel into a stunning portrait of a romantic soul. Read more
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PROTOCOL by János Térey
(Novel in verse, Magveto, 2010, 403 pages)
This four-hundred-page novel written in blank verse just like Paradise Lost tells the modern-day story of the diplomat Ágoston Mátrai, evoking the successes and failures in his career and his love life as well as his business travels around the globe, from Brussels and Jerusalem to New York. An outstanding portrait of contemporary Hungary and it’s „executive class”, it is also a poetic meditation on ambition and the fragility of human relationships. Read more
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ANGST by Gergely Nagy (Novel, Ulpius Ház, 2007, 384 pages)
Set in the Budapest of the near future where skyscrapers transform the urban landscape and five metro lines cross under the city, this cyber-punkish tour de force tells the rise and fall of a talented comics writer who after the exorbitant success of his comics series Angst gets stuck in a day-job working for a media emporium, loses friends and loved ones one by one, and even gets involved in the underground world of media anarchism. Read more
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BORDERS OF THE HEART by Zoltán Poós
(Novel, Kalligram, 2009, 257 pages)
Set during two decisive days twenty years apart – one in 1944, when the Russian troops invade the home town of the protagonist, and he falls in love with a childhood friend at the same time, and one in 1964, when after ten years of marriage, the divorce of the couple is finally declared in communist Hungary – this two-faced novel tells the story of a little country town near the borders of Romania, and the gradual decline of it’s most revered aristocratic family, the Beliczeys. Read more
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