Sándor Márai Books in Order

With their fathers away fighting in 1918, four boys spend their last weeks before military service pursuing rebellious games and petty theft. An encounter with a traveling actor pushes their defiance toward unforeseen consequences.

Esther's former lover returns after more than twenty years, stirring old feelings despite her knowledge of his dishonesty. As friends try to protect her, his arrival threatens to transform her carefully settled life once again.

After escaping a Venetian prison, Casanova reaches Bolzano and encounters an old rival, the Duke of Parma. An intercepted love letter from the duke's wife leads to an unexpected proposal that entangles desire with danger.

Peter and Ilonka's prosperous marriage conceals his enduring attachment to Judit, a servant from his childhood home. Their competing accounts of love and freedom reveal how class divisions shape the lives of all three.

An elderly general receives the friend he has not seen for forty-one years at his secluded castle. Their reunion becomes a confrontation over a shared past, the general's dead wife, and a hunt neither has forgotten.

Márai recalls life in Hungary from the German occupation through the consolidation of communist power. His memoir combines personal observation, humor, and political criticism to portray a country undergoing profound upheaval in the aftermath of war.

This bilingual selection introduces Márai's poetry in English translations by John Ridland and Peter V. Czipott. Poems drawn from across his career reveal another side of the writer best known for his novels.