‘Totally absorbing’ Martha Kearney, Harpe’s Bazaar It is a sort of Galworthisn panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg Empire - perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me’ Jan Morris, Observer Books of the Year He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz brings to the contemplation of this lost Eden’ W. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction - all are here’ Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph ‘Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Two more novels - They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided - followed, usually published as The Transylvanian Trilogy’ Adam Newey, ’1000 Novels You Must Read’, Guardian Banffy - Hungarian count - also writes with extraordinary vividness of the natural beauty of his Transylvanian homeland. ‘A Tolstoyan portrait of the end days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this compulsively readable novel follows the divergent fortunes of two cousins, the politician Abady and gamble/drunkard Gyeroffy, detailing the intrigues at the decadent Budapest court, the doomed love affairs, opulent balls, duels and general head-in-the sand idiocies of a privileged elite whose world is on the verge of disappearing for ever. ‘BÁNFFY IS A BORN STORYTELLER’ PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR, FROM THE FOREWORD In loving memory of Patrick Thursfield, 1923–2003 For my dear children, for whom I first started on this translation of their grandfather’s greatest work so that they should learn to know him better, he who would have loved them so much.
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