The Rebels

Description

It is May 1918, war is sweeping Europe, and a group of boys await graduation in their near-deserted town. Drawn close by an unspoken fear of leaving home to fight, they retreat into a clandestine world of codes, hideaways and fierce invention - until one day a stranger enters their lives and their secret is exposed. From the great Hungarian author of Embers, The Rebels is the story of a final, precious summer: a haunting novel of youthful exuberance burning in the face of irrevocable change.

Sandor Marai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly anti-fascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drwove him from the country in 1948. He went into exile, first in Italy, then in the United States.

'Great qualities of deep, cynical realism combined with a wild, sometimes surrealistic sense of beauty' Sunday Times 'Elegant, languid and almost subversive. To read it is an experience that leaves one fully alert' Irish Times 'Delicate brilliance ... perfect and unforgettable detail, like a landscape in the last moments before darkness falls' Literary Review