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Sandor Marai

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Sandor Marai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly anti-fascist, he survived the Second World War, but persecution by the Communists drove him away from the country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States, Marai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, never knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restoration of democracy to Central Europe. He is the author of over twenty books. Conversations in Bolzano is the second to be translated into English.

Books by Sandor Marai

Portraits Of A Marriage

This startling portrayal of a love triangle, set in Hungary between the world wars, is told from all three perspectives. Peter and Ilonka are a wealthy couple in bourgeois society with an outwardly perfect marriage. And yet, to the insecure Ilonka, her taste is never elegant and refined enough and her looks are never fair enough to fully win the love of her husband. Peter has long been tormented by a secret: he is in love with Judit, a peasant and servant in his childhood home. For Judit, however, even Peter's affection cannot transcend that which she longs for most--the prospect of her own freedom and a future without the constraints of the society that has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss.

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Embers

The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time

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