Love

'A major writer of the twentieth century' Times Literary Supplement

This is not a tale of a love gone mad, but of the madness of love itself

Sliding imperceptibly from prose into poetry, Nádas creates an intense atmosphere that mingles fear with love

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 Péter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

The man has actually come to tell his lover that he wants to leave her, but as soon as he walks in he realises he won't be able to tell her. The woman rolls a joint. They smoke it. And as they drift into another state of mind, he approaches the border zones between being and nonbeing, between living and imagining. Or is it between life and death?

The End Of A Family Story

Amidst the darkness and silence of isolation, The End of a Family Story offers a uniquely imaginative impression of life thwarted by a brutal regime.

Like Nadas's highly praised A Book of Memories, this is a moving, always unusual novel...it lifts the reader into the sort of deeply imagined personal experience that can only be achieved by good fiction

Peter Nadas is unique in that he both fictionalises the storytelling impulse and explores its origins in the consciousness of a child... A magnificent novel... A genuine work of art

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, Love and his most recent, Parallel Stories; a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Péter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

It is 1950s Hungary; a country at the height of Stalinist repression with a populace reduced to silence and deception. An old man flees with his memories of the past in which he believes he can still find redemption, taking with him his grandson, Simon. For him, he invents a fantastic tapestry of stories, a family saga, a fabulous world of myths and legends. 
 
His mother dead and his father condemned by the authorities as a traitor, Simon is sent to an institution where the inmates are sentenced to silence. Liberated by his grandfather's stories, Simon gives dark and passionate testimony to the alienation and treason that surrounds him. Finally he begins to understand how other kinds of family stories will end.

A Book Of Memories

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

Original and exhilarating work that demands to be read again

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

One of the most important novels of our time

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

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

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, Love and Parallel Stories; a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Péter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

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.

Péter Nádas

A virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman...the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memories

No writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas

It's with remarkable dexterity that Nadas splices together the political, sexual and emotional histories of two families, the Hungarian Lippay Lehrs and the German Döhrings

A fiendishly complex plot that leaps in time throughout the 20th century, and in a place through Mitteleuropa

Nadas is closer to Proust and Musil, and even to Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, in his ultra-Freudian, or Lacanian approach... There are instances of real enchantment in Nadas' book

In 1989, the memorable year when the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his early morning run finds a corpse lying on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary richly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Peter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space. 
 
Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to dark secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s, Ágost Lippay-Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political régimes for decades, and Andras Rott, who has his own dark record of dark activities abroad. They are friends in Budapest when we eventually meet them in the spring of 1961, a pivotal time in the postwar epoch and in their clandestine careers. But the richly detailed, dramatic memories and actions of these men, like those of their friends, lovers and family members, range from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, across Hungary. The ever-daring, ever-original episodes of Parallel Lives explore the most intimate, most difficult human experiences in a prose glowing with uncommon clarity and also with mysterious uncertainty - as is characteristic of Nadas's subtle, spirited art. 
 
The web of extended dramas in Parallel Stories reaches not just forward to the transformative year of 1989 but back to the spring of 1939, with Europe trembling on the edge of war; to the bestial times of 1944-45, when Budapest was besieged, the final solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end; and to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. But there is much more to Parallel Stories than that: it is a daring, demanding, and very moving exploration of humanity at its most constrained and its most free.

Péter Nádas

Praise for Parallel Stories

A virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman...the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memo ...

No writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas

It's with remarkable dexterity that Nadas splices together the political, sexual and emotional histories of two families, the Hungarian Lippay Lehrs and the German Döhrings

A virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman...the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memo ...

No writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas

It's with remarkable dexterity that Nadas splices together the political, sexual and emotional histories of two families, the Hungarian Lippay Lehrs and the German Döhrings

A virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman...the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memo ...

No writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas

It's with remarkable dexterity that Nadas splices together the political, sexual and emotional histories of two families, the Hungarian Lippay Lehrs and the German Döhrings

Books by Péter Nádas

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