world: hungary | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Hungary.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Embers	Sándor Márai	46,359	4,379	3,393
The Door	Magda Szabó	37,546	2,202	5,947
The Notebook; The Proof; The Third Lie	Ágota Kristóf	44,782	1,274	2,516
Satantango	László Krasznahorkai	15,896	1,558	1,985
The Paul Street Boys	Ferenc Molnár	25,567	920	1,725
Abigail	Magda Szabó	10,845	525	2,133
The Melancholy of Resistance	László Krasznahorkai	8,123	1,337	1,003
The Good Master	Kate Seredy	4,851	2,401	393

As it was when I did this analysis in 2015, the winner is Embers, a book about an aristocratic household adapting itself to the post First World War with grim realism. In fact, all of the books here are novels by Hungarian writers – Kate Seredy was based in the USA for most of her writing career, but lived in Hungary until she was 23. It is interesting to see recent Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai scoring well – I wonder if that would have been the case if I had done this analysis a year ago.

Including the StoryGraph numbers evened out the genders, losing Sandor Marai’s Esther’s Inheritance and bringing on Abigail.

I disqualified a few books which had Hungarian roots but are not set there, including The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, one of several about Hungarian experience of the Holocaust mainly set outside Hungary, and Flesh by David Szalay, which has clearly been a big hit since its 2024 publication but is set much more in England than in Hungary.

I also thought long and hard about Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig, but decided that in the end it is probably set in what is now the northern Burgenland of Austria, in one of the towns which had historically been part of Hungary with a Hungarian landlord but a mostly German-speaking population. More on that next week.

Next up are Austria and Switzerland, then a jump south to Sierra Leone, then back to Europe for Belarus which will be the last European country for a while.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: world: hungary

The best known books set in each country: Hungary