Search results for ""author magda szabó""

When Ettie's husband dies, her daughter Iza insists that her mother 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, but can't seem to get it right. She irritates the maid, hangs food outside the window because she mistrusts the fridge and, in her naivety and loneliness, invites a prostitute in for tea. 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 we construct over a lifetime.

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"One of Hungary's most important twentieth-century writers" New York Times"Magda Szabó's fiction shows the travails of modern Hungarian history from oblique but sharply illuminating angles" EconomistEszter Encsy is an acclaimed actress, funny and outrageous, quick-witted but callous. Yet even flushed with the success of adulthood, Eszter craves acceptance of herself as she really is and of the person she has been. The only child of an impoverished aristocrat and a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, Eszter grew up poor and painfully aware of it in a provincial Hungarian town.The feelings of resentment and envy acquired during her fraught childhood have hardened into an obsessional hatred for one person, the beautiful, saintly and pampered Angéla, Eszter's former classmate and the wife of the man who becomes her lover. Set against newly communist 1950s Hungary, The Fawn embraces the lies and falsehoods people were obliged to live with in those nightmarish times, and displays Szabó's uncanny ability to convey how the past can haunt and consume us.Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION 2023"One of Hungary's most important twentieth-century writers" New York Times"Magda Szabo's fiction shows the travails of modern Hungarian history from oblique but sharply illuminating angles" EconomistEszter Encsy is an acclaimed actress, funny and outrageous, quick-witted but callous. Yet even flushed with the success of adulthood, Eszter craves acceptance of herself as she really is and of the person she has been. The only child of an impoverished aristocrat and a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, Eszter grew up poor and painfully aware of it in a provincial Hungarian town. The feelings of resentment and envy acquired during her fraught childhood have hardened into an obsessional hatred for one person, the beautiful, saintly and pampered Angela, Eszter's former classmate and the wife of the man who becomes her lover. Set against newly communist 1950s Hungary, The Fawn embraces the lies and falsehoods people were obliged to live with in those nightmarish times, and displays Szabo's uncanny ability to convey how the past can haunt and consume us.Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.

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Emerence is a domestic servant – strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda’s friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly.Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

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A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war."A school story for grownups that is also about our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS"Of all Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership. It's an adventure story, brilliantly written" TIBOR FISCHEROf all her novels, Magda Szabó's Abigail is indeed the most widely read in her native Hungary. Now, fifty years after it was written, it appears for the first time in English, joining Katalin Street and The Door in a loose trilogy about the impact of war on those who have to live with the consequences. It is late 1943 and Hitler, exasperated by the slowness of his Hungarian ally to act on the "Jewish question" and alarmed by the weakness on his southern flank, is preparing to occupy the country. Foreseeing this, and concerned for his daughter's safety, a Budapest father decides to send her to a boarding school away from the capital. A lively, sophisticated, somewhat spoiled teenager, she is not impressed by the reasons she is given, and when the school turns out to be a fiercely Puritanical one in a provincial city a long way from home, she rebels outright. Her superior attitude offends her new classmates and things quickly turn sour.It is the start of a long and bitter learning curve that will open her eyes to her arrogant blindness to other people's true motives and feelings. Exposed for the first time to the realities of life for those less privileged than herself, and increasingly confronted by evidence of the more sinister purposes of the war, she learns lessons about the nature of loyalty, courage, sacrifice and love.Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

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