I knew the names of the nine already: the scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner; the photographers Robert Capa and André Kertesz; the film-makers Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and Alexander Korda (The third man); the writer Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon).
I did not know that they were all Hungarians who fled to Britain and America because they were all Jews (albeit lapsed).
Isolated by both language and ethnicity, they learned early that their choice was “innovate or die” – and their innovations would shape the world in which we live.
Marton, herself a Hungarian exile, uses her language skills and her insights to provide a riveting collective biography of the nine and their breathtaking journey from Budapest to the Anglo-Saxon World. Hitler shook the tree, and we picked up the fruit.
Author Kati Marton follows these nine over the decades as they flee fascism and anti-Semitism, seek sanctuary in England and America, and set out to make their mark. The scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner enlist Albert Einstein to get Franklin Roosevelt to initiate the development of the atomic bomb. Along with John von Neuman, who pioneers the computer, they succeed in achieving that goal before Nazi Germany, ending the Second World War, and opening a new age. Arthur Koestler writes the most important anti-Communist novel of the century, Darkness at Noon. Robert Capa is the first photographer…
Watson's writing did more than just explain the First World War from the perspective of Germany and Austria-Hungary - although that alone would have been enough to make it a fascinating read - but on top of that it gave me a window into the people themselves as the world they knew was torn apart and their future quite literally blown up before their very eyes.
Winner of the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History's 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the Year
For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a…
I have penned more than 120 nonfiction books on a broad range of subjects for general audiences and middle-school readers, including five books about the true-life experiences of young people during the Holocaust. The most heartbreaking, yet inspiring, moments in my decades-long writing career have been my interviews with Holocaust survivors, who, as children, relied on their courage, their faith, their smarts—and sometimes their luck—to endure years of unbelievable terror.
This is an extremely well-written first-person account of how anti-Semitism followed and haunted Livia (born Elli Friedmann in Czechoslovakia) before, during, and after she, her brother, and mother were shipped off to Auschwitz. The atrocities and harassment they endured in the death camp didn’t stop after they were liberated in 1945 because so many anti-Semites made life unbearable, yet eventually Livia and her family triumphed.
So wonders thirteen-year-old Elli Friedmann as she fights for her life in a Nazi concentration camp. A remarkable memoir, I Have Lived a Thousand Years is a story of cruelty and suffering, but at the same time a story of hope, faith, perseverance, and love.
It wasn’t long ago that Elli led a normal life that included family, friends, school, and thoughts about boys. A life in which Elli could lie and daydream for hours that she was a beautiful and elegant celebrated poet.
I grew up exploring the semi-decayed air-raid shelters near my grandmother’s home in London—to her horror: she said they were full of rats and drunks. The Second World War and its effect on people, especially women, off the frontline has long fascinated me. To pursue my obsession with writing stories on this subject, I have made trips to genocide memorials in former Yugoslavia, bunkers in Brittany, and remote towns in Poland. My novels concern themselves with how the violence, and sometimes heroism, of the past trickles down a family’s bloodline, affecting later generations of women.
I’m cheating here a bit as the novel’s set in Paris before the Second World War and covers a variety of locations, including the Sudetenland and Budapest. But it is foreshadowed by war. Furst writes travel pieces as well as fiction and it shows in the way he brings the brasseries, the Seine, and the apartments, along with the abattoirs, railway sidings, and threatening outlying backstreets to life in his books, many of which return to Paris again and again.
A novel of adventure and intrigue in wartime Europe
Paris, 1938. Nicholas Morath, former Hungarian cavalry officer, returns home to his young mistress in the 7th arrondissement. He's been in Vienna where, amid the mobs screaming for Hitler, he's done a quiet favour for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi is a diplomat and, desperate to stop his country's drift into alliance with Nazi Germany, he trades in conspiracy - with SS renegades, Abwehr officers, British spies and NKVD defectors, leading Morath deeper and deeper into danger as Europe edges towards war.
I am a writer, a hypnotherapist, and a consciousness researcher. Ever since I was a baby, I had the memory and the sense that there was more to our existence than meets the eye. Even though I started my career as a lawyer in Vienna, Austria, after a transformative illness and a series of spiritually awakening experiences, I left for Mexico to pursue my calling as a metaphysical explorer and writer. Ever since, I’ve spent my life mapping out various dimensions of the psyche. When I’m not traveling, I like to retreat into my small highland cottage with Marius, the border collie, and Kasiopea, the black magic cat.
With this Hungarian author, I share the same birthday, as well as our mystical philosophy on life. Her book is an epic alchemical tale spanning centuries that describes the evolution of consciousness through subsequent incarnations from one life to the next.
I find not only the book itself fascinating but also the story of how it came into being. The author began to write it in a bomb shelter during WWII. Afterward, the Communists banned it and burned it, yet a few copies were miraculously rescued and hand-copied during dictatorial times.
Today, the book enjoys cult status in its homeland of Hungary. Unfortunately, the English translation is currently out of print, but if you can lay your hands on a version you can read, don’t miss out on this masterpiece.
Conceived amidst the horrors and hellfire of the Second World War, Mria Szepes' novel about a man's search for the Elixir of Life offered a glimpse of hope at a time of con-flagration. By giving a broad cosmic perspective to the events touching the lives of everyone in Europe in those years, she put human existence in a broader scale extending beyond daily life and put forth a reason for existence within the entirety of the Universe. After the war this remarkable book was published in Budapest but was soon banned by the government. Following decades of hibernation, like the…
I’m a historian of Latin America and a professor at California State University, Los Angeles. I write about Chile’s labor and social history in the twentieth century. As a historian, I am especially interested in understanding how working people relate with public institutions and authorities, what they expect from the state, and how they have organized and expanded social and economic rights. While my research centers in Chile and Latin America, I also look to place regional debates in a transnational framework and see how ideas and people have moved across borders. I like books that bring working people’s diverse voices and experiences.
This is a fantastic book to understand how welfare institutions work. Lynne Haney, a sociologist, looks at the state from the bottom up and analyzes the relationship between welfare recipients and caseworkers in Hungary. It is a book rich in stories that place people, especially women, at the center of debates about welfare and social rights.
Inventing the Needy offers a powerful, innovative analysis of welfare policies and practices in Hungary from 1948 to the last decade of the twentieth century. Using a compelling mix of archival, interview, and ethnographic data, Lynne Haney shows that three distinct welfare regimes succeeded one another during that period and that they were based on divergent conceptions of need. The welfare society of 1948-1968 targeted social institutions, the maternalist welfare state of 1968-1985 targeted social groups, and the liberal welfare state of 1985-1996 targeted impoverished individuals. Because they reflected contrasting conceptions of gender and of state-recognized identities, these three regimes…
I am an ex-lawyer, ex-army officer, and ex-Hollywood film editor who loves stories about females in danger who dig deep to solve problems and survive. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I marvel at the breadth of female styles–from delicate, feminine, and sweet to brave, adventuresome, and tough. I have edited films about various women characters, from Charlize Theron’s killer in Monster to Cate Blanchett’s spiritual medium in The Gift and Diane Lane’s brave romantic survivor in Under the Tuscan Sun. I have three successful step granddaughters: an accountant, a lawyer, and one getting a PhD in computer studies. Smart, talented, and interesting women people in my life.
As an infantry veteran, I felt especially drawn to the daughter’s loyalty and love of her dad; I shared her passion for exploring his diaries and traveling to the places in Hungary he described when his bomber was shot down in WWII.
I was thrilled at each stage of the daughter’s search for her dad near Budapest, and I tensed as she tried to decide which locals were on her side and which were out to deceive or harm her. I loved her passion to find the woman who had saved her dad’s life and I marveled at the wonders and charm of the two halves of the city, split by the Danube.
Getting caught in the middle of an international art theft ring wasn't supposed to be part of the deal Kat Lawson made with her dying father. But when her father receives a mysterious letter informing the former WW2 navigator/bombardier that his downed B-24 has been found and asking him to come to Hungary, Kat suspects this is all part of some senior rip-off scam. Her father insists she go, not only to photograph the final resting place of his plane but also to find the mother and son who risked their lives to rescue him and hid him in a…
I’ve always loved history and have written four novels set in the past. Maybe I was drawn to the past because I partly grew up in Bath–a city where you seem to be living in the eighteenth century. But recent history tells us who we are now, and I’ve always wanted to deal with the subject of the Holocaust since, at the age of thirteen, I came across a book about it in my town’s public library. At that time, nobody talked about it, and I was traumatized by it. How could human beings do such things? I think puzzling over that is partly why I became a writer.
This novel shocked and even horrified me at first with its graphic description of a woman’s sexual fantasies. What has this to do with the horrors that are to follow? What is the relevance to the Holocaust of Freud’s attempt to treat this disturbed woman? The novel created huge controversy on its publication, and it took me several readings to understand what the author was suggesting–at least, what I think he meant because nothing is spelled out for the reader.
This is the heartbreaking story of a young woman and her small son caught up in the horror of what the Nazis did in Ukraine, and what I think D. M. Thomas is doing in the most inventive and daring manner is to show how deeply embedded in the psyche of Europe is the wickedness, the psychological sickness, that led to the Holocaust. I’m usually uneasy with the supernatural in…
The worldwide bestselling, Booker-shortlisted modern classic
Now a BBC radio play starring Anne-Marie Duff and Bill Paterson, dramatised by Dennis Potter.
'Spine-tingling... heart-stunning' New York Times
'A novel of blazing imaginative and intellectual force' Salman Rushdie
'This novel is a reminder that fiction can amaze' Time
'Precise, troubling, brilliant' Observer
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The White Hotel is a modern classic of searing eroticism and sensuality set against the broad sweep of twentieth-century history.
It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying…
I'm a poet and creative mentor, and it’s the intensity of poetic language – its expansiveness and limitations – that shows up in my fiction and in the novels I love. Quinnis an exploration of male violence, incarceration, and radical forgiveness. I’ve spent a decade working with long-term prisoners in Scotland, trying to understand and come to terms with notions of justice and responsibility: does guilt begin and end with the perpetrator of a violent act or are we all in some way culpable? How can literary form dig into this question aslant? Can the unsettled mind be a space for innovative thinking?
Kristóf (1935-2011) was a Hungarian writer who fled to Switzerland during the war and wrote in French.
The Notebook (the first in the trilogy) is currently number one on my list of all-time favourites. It has all the elements of storytelling that I love: deep, psychological insight into the human heart; adroit use of archetypes, which give the book a timeless, folkloric feel; concision (no waffling) and a poetic, pared-back language that creates a sense of startling immediacy.
Kristóf writes about World War II through the eyes of two young brothers in a Nazi-occupied country (unnamed), and she shocks us awake not through sensationalised violence but through matter-of-fact narration.
It reads like a cross-between dramatic monologue and biblical parable – she stretches the novel form and opens up new possibilities for writing.
The book was a captivating and one-of-a-kind experience. The portrayal of grief was beautifully handled, offering a fresh perspective. While the pacing was slower at times, I was completely engrossed. Nesbit, Dove, Drea, Bastion, and Brandy were simply unforgettable. I found myself deeply connected to them all. The ending was incredibly moving, not only because of the emotional content but also due to the bittersweet farewell to such a remarkable group of characters.
