Parallel Stories

A Novel

Péter Nádas; Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
 
A once-in-a-generation literary event: the monumental masterwork being hailed as a “twenty-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—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.

Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary’s different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war, and extends to the bestial times of 1944–45, when Budapest was besieged, the Final Solution devastated Hungary’s Jews, and the war came to an end, and on to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. We follow these men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, from village to city in Hungary. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary greatly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Péter Nádas’s magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.

This is Péter Nádas’s masterpiece—eighteen 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.

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Reviews

Praise for Parallel Stories

Praise for A Book of Memories

“The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century.” —Susan Sontag

“An epic and immensely fertile exploration of contemporary history and sensibility.” —Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

In the Press

‘Parallel Stories,’ a Novel by Peter Nadas - Review - NYTimes.com
“Parallel Stories,” by the Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas, explores the lives of numerous characters as their experiences unfold during the tumultuous history of 20th-century Europe.
- The New York Times

PARALLEL STORIES by Péter Nádas, Imre GoldsteinKirkus Book Reviews
Read the Kirkus Review of PARALLEL STORIES . A robust epic of a Mitteleuropa lurching out of totalitarianism into whatever passes for modern society--"not a terrain without perils," as one of the principal characters grimly observes.
- Kirkus Reviews

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About the Author

Péter Nádas; Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein

Péter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942. Among his works translated into English are the novels A Book of Memories (FSG, 1997), The End of a Family Story (FSG, 1998), and Love (FSG, 2000); a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge (FSG, 2007); and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Péter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

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Available Formats and Book Details

Parallel Stories
A Novel
Péter Nádas; Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein

Hardcover

Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2011
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374229764
ISBN10: 0374229767
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 1152 pages
$40.00
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e-Book Agency
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2011
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429963572
ISBN10: 1429963573
1152 pages
$19.99
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