Four books by writers from Hungary, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with The Door and Embers.
Hungary has two Nobel laureates in literature: Imre Kertész in 2002 and, most recently, László Krasznahorkai in 2025. Hungarian, the language of this writing, belongs to the Uralic family rather than the Indo-European one. The national poet is Sándor Petőfi, whose verse folk-tale John the Valiant was written in 1844 and who became a voice of the 1848 revolution. Twentieth-century writers worked through two world wars, the Holocaust and decades of communist rule.
Kertész's Fatelessness sends a Budapest teenager to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Krasznahorkai's Satantango portrays a collapsing collective farm on the Great Hungarian Plain in the late communist era. Sándor Márai's Embers has an ageing general awaiting an old friend in a decaying castle, a world of Austro-Hungarian officers and their codes of honour. Magda Szabó's The Door traces a writer's bond with her formidable housekeeper in Budapest.
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A writer's bond with her formidable housekeeper in Budapest reveals postwar Hungarian class, domestic life and buried wartime trauma.
A aging general awaits his old friend in a decaying Hungarian castle, evoking the fading Austro-Hungarian officer class and its codes of honour.
Bleak, hypnotic portrait of a collapsing collective farm on the Great Hungarian Plain in the late communist era.
A Budapest teenager is deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald; opens with Jewish Budapest life in 1944 and returns home.
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