They Were Found Wanting

Pleasure of a different scale and kind. It is a sort of Galsworthian panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg empire - perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me. * Observer “Books of the Year” *
Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction - all are here. * Daily Telegraph *
An impressively fluent text. In telling its larger story, it gives a wealth of detail about an extraordinary society, and makes you feel that the colours, scents and sounds of distant lives are still spread out before you. * Times Literary Supplement *
Fascinating. He writes about the quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Milosz brings to the contemplation of his lost Eden * Guardian *
Plunge into the cleansing waters of a rediscovered masterpiece. * Daily Telegraph *
Like Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, Miklos Banffy is one of those novelists Austria-Hungary specialised in. Intimate and sparkling chroniclers of a wider ruin, ironic and elegiac. * Daily Telegraph *
Full of arresting descriptions, beautiful evocations of scenery and wise political and moral insights. * Spectator *

Count Miklos Banffy (1873-1950) was a diplomat, MP and foreign minister in 1921-22, during which time he signed the peace treaty with the United States and obtained Hungary’s admission to the League of Nations. He organized the last Habsburg coronation, that of King Karl in 1916. His famous “The Writing on the Wall” trilogy was first published in Budapest in the 1930s, and rediscovered for the international market after the fall of communism. This epic work has been translated into ten languages.

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