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“How much luck does a life need?” the novel asks again and again in a story spanning generations. In 1904 a young Jewish man, Manó Wolfner, boards a ship to try his fortune in America with his brothers. Separated from them, he stands on his own two feet, learns a trade and returns to Hungary to marry his childhood sweetheart. We follow his family for more than a hundred years – which is also the story of the family business. Through deportations, nationalisation and forced resettlement, later under socialism and after the fall of communism, there is always an idea, a stubborn defiance or a loophole that keeps the paper-goods factory alive and thriving. And so we reach the first decade of the 21st century, when Gyuri, the third-generation heir turned tycoon, has to reckon with the price of success – and with how a family pays for that particular luck.

“My father’s shoulder was not one you could cry on.” With only slight exaggeration, the whole novel is contained in its opening line. The narrator wants to understand her father – traumatised, shifty, ruthless, charming, and stubbornly silent about his childhood. Viktória Lugosi is a persistent and tender questioner; the story is full of twists and deeply moving, the prose precise and delicate. Within it lies a story never told before: the years of the Deszk Children’s Village, whose mission after the Second World War was to heal orphaned and half-orphaned Jewish children and prepare them for a new life in Israel. Most of them left – but some stayed.

“The writer knows instinctively that it is not the big things you need to know, but the details.”

András Visky

Oy Vey! tells the story of three generations of a Jewish family in Central Europe with delicate humour and profound insight into human nature. Through the eyes of a highly sensitive little girl it captures the joys and sorrows of the 1960s and 1970s – seen from below, with spot-on precision and disarming honesty.

“Precise, bold, amusing and deeply moving.”

Zsuzsa Rakovszky

A businessman. A bank clerk. A history teacher. A housewife. Nothing in common, nothing in particular. Yet they are bound together by the fall of socialism, which robs them of their dreams and opportunities; by the city, which could be any city in Eastern Europe; and by a secret. A swirling, eddying story of the past thirty years – of hope, blunders, confusion and delusion in the post-socialist world.

“Migratory Lobster offers engaging portraits of the winners and losers of the past several decades.”

György Dragomán

Humorous and moving snapshots of the upheaval and devastation that infertility brings into the life of a family.

A giraffe has escaped from the zoo because the animals there were being mistreated. The wise Hümmögő and his friends hatch a devilishly clever plan to rescue everyone who is suffering – and in the end a new election is called to decide who should run the zoo. And that is only the beginning of the adventures. Winner of the IBBY Children’s Book of the Year Prize.

“I was captivated by its humour, its subtle irony and that inner cheerfulness without which no one can write a good children’s book.”

Ervin Lázár