Lit in Translation

Katalin Street

Katalin utca

Magda Szabó (born 1917)

Translated by Len Rix

English editions

In English

* Affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate and a Bookshop.org affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. The price stays the same for you.

In three neighbouring houses on a Budapest street live three families: a dentist's, with one daughter; a schoolteacher's, with his two girls, Irén and Blanka; and that of an army officer whose son is Bálint. The parents are friends and the children grow up side by side, until the war and the years after it test every loyalty and reveal how each of them acts when it counts. The street itself is changed beyond recognition, and the novel, in which the dead move among those still alive, asks who can ever return to the lost world of their childhood and what it costs to betray the people we love.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form
Novel
Length
249 pages in the original
Genres
Family, War (assigned by AI)
Set in
Hungary
First published
1969 by Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó
Author's age
52 when first published
ISBN

9781681371528 (NYRB Classics, United States)

9780857058454 (MacLehose Press, United Kingdom)

9780857058478 (MacLehose Press, United Kingdom)

More
Wikidata