Blogs in May 2024

The Piano Player of Budapest 28th May 2024

All future, freedom and success lay ahead of young pianist Stephen de Bastion in 1930s Hungary. Life whirled headily around cocktails, romance, applause and the buzz of Budapest late into the night. Then, 1939. Stephen’s world disintegrates and this...

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Fire Music 23rd April 2024

Antal Varga, a Budapest violinist, is 78 years old when a young American stranger places a yellowed music sheet into his hands. With shock he recognizes his own teenage handwriting, for he himself wrote this piece in 1945, when...

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When the Summer Was Ours 19th January 2024

A sweeping tale about lovers separated by circumstance, the lives they each lead, and the various points at which their journeys intersect. Set mostly in Hungary (Sopron and Budapest) with chapters in both Germany (Dachau) and the USA (New...

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Sisi: Empress on Her Own 2nd December 2023

Married to Emperor Franz Joseph, Elisabeth—fondly known as Sisi—captures the hearts of her people as their “fairy queen,” but beneath that dazzling persona lives a far more complex figure. In mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, the halls of the Hofburg Palace buzz...

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The Songs We Hide 31st March 2021

In communist Hungary, a peasant loses his land, a young mother loses her baby’s father, and both are scared into silence–until music brings them together to face the agonizing tests ahead.

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