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  • Published: 7 August 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099766315
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 720
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

A Book Of Memories




Acclaimed Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas weaves together three voices to blow the history of his country wide open.

A Book of Memories is made up of three first-person narratives:

The first, that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family.

A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences.

A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship.

Together these brilliantly coloured lives are integrated into a powerful work of tragic intensity.

  • Published: 7 August 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099766315
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 720
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

About the author

Peter Nádas

Peter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942. Among his works translated into English are the novels A Book of Memories, The End of a Family Story, and Love; a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Peter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

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Praise for A Book Of Memories

Original and exhilarating work that demands to be read again

Sunday Times

The greatest novel written in our time, one of the great books of the century

Susan Sontag

One of the most important novels of our time

Times Literary Supplement

The monumental event of recent Hungarian history, the fated uprising of 1956, is accounted for in the most affecting manner imaginable in these haunted pages

Daily Telegraph

What makes this Book of Memories so memorable is the sheer quality of the prose, its subtlety and intelligence, which shines through what seems an elegant and unobtrusively American translation

The Times
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