The 1000-year-old kingdom of Hungary, which formed a major part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was dismemebered by the allies in 1918. Phoenix-like, the Hungarian people survived the horrors of war, the disappointment of the first socialist republic, the disillusion of the brief but terrifying rule of Bela Kun and the bitterness of seeing their beloved country broken apart by the Treaty of Trianon.

'In his hands these national events possess all the intimacy of his fiction, and the reader views them as if he or she were attending a lively cabaret by the Danube' Telegraph