In the waning months of 1956, while Russian tanks roll into the public squares of Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee with their family to the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina. As they travel through minefields both real and imagined, Robert and Attila grapple with sibling rivalry, family secrets, and incalculable loss to arrive at a place they thought they’d lost forever: home.
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Publisher:
Toronto : Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Incorporated, a Penguin Random House Company, 2014.
ISBN:
9780143191483
0143191489
0143191489
Characteristics:
248 pages ;,23 cm
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Liber_vermis
Dec 14, 2014
"... I was inspired to write a novel about my family's escape from Hungary when I was not yet five. I had vivid and traumatic memories of seeing Hungarian soldiers hanging from lampposts ... and of running by night across a minefield to freedom in Austria. In my novel, I doubled the age of the two brothers so that they could make more sense of the world ..., more sense of displacement, of leaving a life behind, and then something magical happened. ... the book took a surprising turn, one I hadn't anticipated, it surprised me most. [Writing this book] was a transcendental experience." The author interviewed in "The Book Report" of 'The Globe & Mail' newspaper of December 13, 2014.
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Add a CommentA moving read, but I found it far too short. The innocence of the narrator tugs at your heart strings as he encounters death and a family secret while fleeing the Hungarian Revolution.