A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country’s history from early tribal invasion to Soviet subordination to European Community membership.
Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former Nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour.
Like a fly in amber, this is a moment captured of a time and a place under peaceful upheaval. The old ways are vanishing. But what is being lost and what is remaining only slowly comes clear.
Jill Culiner spends years of her life there, chronicling these changes, learning the language and buying property. She weaves her own story with the story of that community and the history of living on the edge of the Great Hungarian Plain.
It’s a raw story, honestly told, of a people crisscrossed with violence and hatreds, loves and escapes.
There remains one constant: hatred of the long-vanished rural Jew.
Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain by Jill Culiner is published on 28 February, 2024.
There are more historical books, both fiction and non-fiction, in our round-up of over 140 books coming out this year.
