Parallel Stories

A once-in-a-generation literary event: the monumental masterwork being hailed as a ��wenty-first-century War and Peace��(Magyar Nemzet)

In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans��ungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies��cross the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.

Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose Germanmother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; �gost Lippay Lehr,whose influential father has served Hungary'sdifferent political regimes for decades; and Andr獺sRott, who has his own dark record of mysteriousactivities abroad. The web of extended andinterconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back tothe spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on theedge of war, and extends to the bestial times of1944��5, when Budapest was besieged, the FinalSolution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the warcame to an end, and on to the cataclysmic HungarianRevolution of October 1956. We followthese men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerlandand Holland, from the Mediterranean to theNorth Sea, and of course, from village to city inHungary. The social and political circumstancesof their lives may vary greatly, their sexual andspiritual longings may seem to each of thementirely unique, yet P矇ter N獺das's magnificenttapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallelsthat link them across time and space.

This is P矇ter N獺das's masterpiece��ighteen years in the writing, a sensation in Hungary even before it was published, and almost four years in the translating. Parallel Stories is the first foreign translation of this daring, demanding, and momentous novel, and it confirms for an even larger audience what Hungary already knows: that it is the author's greatest work.