Csardas

This fabulous book was received very promptly - in excellent condition. Highly recommend this dealer. Thanks very much.

If you haven't yet discovered Diane Pearson, you are in for a real treat. What a comprehensive writer she is .. developing her characters well, then carrying you and them into well researched historical facts interposed into fiction. She is a phenomenal writer, although I haven't seen anything "new" from her since 1992. I believe her earliest works were published in the mid 60's. If you treat yourself to one of her books, you will surely want to read everything she has ever written, and she won't disappoint you! This is truly top-level reading .. you can't put it down until you realize you are nearly finished with the book and don't want it to end, so you start pacing yourself .. only 2 pages per day to make it last as long as possible. Everyone to whom I've loaned this book has loved it and wants more.

I was really curious about this novel. I guess there are not too much foreign writers who write novels about my country's history. I'm glad I bought it, because it is really a good novel - a family saga set in Hungary of the first half of the 20th century. It begins (in a very Gone With The Wind-like way) with the story of two beautiful sisters, Malie and Eva, the admired belles of a small town. Then the first world war breaks out and their world changes forever. They survive and move on with their lives, both of them get married - Malie (the calm and quiet older sister), who is mourning over the loss of the young soldier she loved, has to marry a wealthy man in order to save the family, but her marriage after all turns out to be happy; Eva, on the other side, is unhappily married to the brother of the man she loves, while her beloved has to marry her plain-looking cousin. All their personal troubles and tragedies are dwarfed when the World War II breaks out and brings danger and death to the partly Jewish family. The story ends with the new generation growing up in the new, Communist state.