The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he lyrically describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of Hungarian Transylvania, later to fall into the hands of first the Nazis and then the Communists, his love for Adrienne, married to an unpleasant and dangerous lunatic, and a Proustian society helplessly bent on its own destruction. This is a novel hard to put down, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that deserves to be much more widely known. First published in English in the early 1990s by a small publisher, and a huge word-of-mouth success, this is the first edition in hardback, and in two rather than three volumes.