Eye of the Monkey
  • Published: 18 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781644214954
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $60.00

Eye of the Monkey

A Novel

  • Krisztina Tóth
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A doctor-patient love affair goes awry in this near-future dystopian novel, the first by the award winning Hungarian writer to be translated into English.

“Like peering into the abyss and finding your consciousness forever altered. You cannot escape this book, you already hear its thunder!” —Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

A doctor-patient love affair goes awry in this near-future dystopian novel, the first by the award winning Hungarian writer to be translated into English.

“Like peering into the abyss and finding your consciousness forever altered. You cannot escape this book, you already hear its thunder!” —Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Eye of the Monkey begins in the wake of a devastating civil war that led to the formation of the United Regency, an autocracy in an unnamed European country. The ravages of war are sweeping, and the populace has been divided into segregated zones, where the well-off are under mass surveillance and the poor are phantom presences, confined and ghettoized.

On the verge of a nervous breakdown after being followed by a young man for weeks, Giselle, a history professor at the New University, seeks the help of Dr. Mihály Kreutzer, a psychiatrist who is navigating divorce and the recent death of his mother. They soon begin a torrid love affair, but everything is not what it seems. As Giselle begins to unpack her family history and the possible root of her psychological crisis, Dr. Kreutzer, who has ties to some of the most powerful people in the country, possesses ulterior motives of his own.

In Tóth’s deftly woven, polyphonic, and dystopian novel—full of twists, turns, and treachery—we plumb the depths of a fractured, disturbed, and isolated society, as well as the underbelly of social perversions such a society produces. In this intricate web, stories within stories reveal the complicated lives of women and men who struggle to negotiate the networks of power and poverty that have shaped their lives and their relationships to one another.
  • Published: 18 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781644214954
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $60.00

Praise for Eye of the Monkey

“The novel abounds in memorable details rendered with extraordinary sensitivity. The lyrical chapter titles also indicate the ways in which the author’s poetic vision enriches the spiritual and emotional nuances of this deeply engrossing work…The multi-threaded, enigmatic narrative developments move briskly and confidently towards the conclusion, with even the smallest narrative elements falling into place within the novel’s structure. In the end, the mysteries are solved; private misdeeds and crimes come to light. Yet there is no relief: the course of evil does not retreat from its stubbornly held positions.”
—Erno Balogh, nepszava.hu

“It is enthralling how the story comes together through the assemblage of these small puzzle pieces, just as it becomes clear just how elaborate and well-thought-out is the composition underlying the book. Throughout the entire narrative, relational systems of abuse are present; reflected in every storyline and in the background are the functioning mechanisms of power. And we, the readers, become acquainted with every point of view and past occurrence so that, just as the monkey with the transplanted head [in the infamous experiment of the 1970s], we too can open our eyes and can gaze, for a moment, into the depths of the experiment that is taking place with all of us right now.”
—Forgách Kinga, konyvesmagazin.hu

“The novel Eye the Monkey is a love story written not with a beating heart, but with grimy asphalt paving, the expensive blazers of politicians, the walls of war-damaged nuclear power plants and the dreariness of human corruption.”
—Kovács Bálint, hvg.hu

“If we can not surmise, from Krisztina Tóth's Eye of the Monkey, what our world will be like 10 or 20 years from now, we can certainly discern what our present is like.”
—Edit Domján, revizoronline.com

“Eye of the Monkey is a work of high literature, like all of Krisztina Tóth's writing—a little uncomfortable, disturbing, strange, and surprising. But how good it is to realize that yes—things are really like this, and it’s good to think about the questions the novel raises. These questions are given, but it is up to us to find the right answers.”
—Judit Gardener, cornandsoda.com

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