The Dispossessed

A literary sensation on its original publication in Hungary, this hypnotic, hauntingly beautiful first novel from the acclaimed, award-winning poet and author Szilárd Borbély depicts the poverty and cruelty experienced by a partly-Jewish family in a rural village in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

"No one has ever written so beautifully and at the same time so without pity about the suffering in the isolated provincial villages of Hungary...His sentences have a surgical precision, and their sustained rhythm only reinforces the power of what they evoke."—Nicole Henneberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
In a tiny village in northeast Hungary, close to the Romanian border, a young, unnamed boy warily observes day-to-day life and chronicles his family's struggles to survive. Like most of the villagers, his family is desperately poor, but their situation is worse than most—they are ostracized because of his father's...