'Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers' Ali Smith'A novel to love as well as admire, always playful and ironical, full of brilliant descriptions, bon mots and absurd situations' GuardianA major modern classic: the turbulent story of a businessman torn between middle-class respectability and sensational bohemoiaMihály and Erzsi are on honeymoon in Italy. Mihály has recently joined the respectable ...

**'A dark domestic fairy tale' New York TimesA young writer employs a housekeeper - and slowly finds herself the sole keeper of the older woman's sercrets.**Magda is a writer, Emerence her housekeeper. Magda is new to their quiet Hungarian town, while Emerence, fierce and enigmatic, knows and is known by all. Though Emerence enters Magda’s home whenever she pleases, the door to Emerence’s own strange abode remains barred. Still, somehow, over the course of twenty y...

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 Hunga...

In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna...

Enthralling stories from the celebrated author of The Transylvanian Trilogy 'A great storyteller' Guardian Back from Troy, the 'divine' Helen looks with fresh eyes at her foul-mouthed hero-husband; a girl in a mountain village seeks reassurance about her arranged marriage; a drunken mandarin invites the devil to tea; and a German princess discovers that people actually drink goat's milk. These delightful tales exhibit Bánffy's customary blend of high seriousness and subtle humour, his rich...

"An absolute treat... Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language" Nicholas Lezard, GuardianAt an end-of-season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar, Dr János Bátky, is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Bátky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go. Once there, nothing is quite as it seems...

One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015"An NYRB Classics OriginalThe Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else ...

** NOW SHORTLISTED FOR THE WARWICK WOMEN IN TRANSLATION PRIZE 2019 **** WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE **BY THE AUTHOR OF THE DOOR, ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2015"Extraordinary" New York Times"Quite unforgettable" Daily Telegraph"Unusual, piercing . . . oddly percipient" Irish T...

A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists. In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb's last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a s...

"Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the twentieth century" Paul Bailey, Daily TelegraphThe bored young ruler of an idyllic Central European country plots a coup against himself and escapes to Venice in search of 'real' experience. There he falls in with a team of ambitious con-men and ends up, to his own surprise, impersonating himself.In this wonderfully droll tale the king's journey through successive levels of illusion and reality teaches him much about ...

Hungarian Antal Szerb is best known in the West as the author of three extraordinary novels, most notably Journey by Moonlight (1937), and a highly entertaining study of the Ancient Regime in France: The Queen's Necklace (1942). This selection of his stories and novellas, set variously in mythical times and in the London and Paris of the twenties and thirties, reflects his love of life and the irrepressible irony that is his trademark.

"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.T...