Magda Szabó
1) The door
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Publication Date
[2015]
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The 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 with Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken control...
2) Abigail
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Publication Date
[2020]
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Fourteen-year-old Gina, the spoiled daughter of a Hungarian general, rails against being sent to boarding school far from Budapest when war breaks out, but finds help in a statue of Abigail and her new "sisters."
3) Iza's ballad
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
When Ettie's husband dies, her daughter Iza insists that her mother give up the family house in the countryside and move to Budapest. Displaced from her community and her home, Ettie tries to find her place in this new life, but can't seem to get it right. She irritates the maid, hangs food outside the window because she mistrusts the fridge and, in her naivety and loneliness, invites a prostitute in for tea. It is the story of a woman who loses her...
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Publication Date
[2017]
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
In preewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist. Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation,...
5) The fawn
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Publication Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"In The Door, in Iza's Ballad, and in Abigail, Magda Szabó describes the complex relationships between women of different ages and backgrounds with an astute and unsparing eye. Eszter, the narrator and protagonist of The Fawn, may well be Szabó's most fascinating creation. Eszter, an only child, her father an eccentric aristocrat and steeply downwardly mobile flower breeder, her mother a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, grows up...
6) Pilate
Publisher
Synergetic Distribution
Language
Hungarian
Description
The mother loves her daughter; the daughter loves her mother. The tragedy of misunderstood love. The adaptation of Magda Szabo's novel translated into twelve languages.


