Sándor Márai Libros

Compuesta de tres monólogos, correspondientes a los tres personajes que conforman la novela. Una tarde, en una elegante cafetería de Budapest, una mujer relata a su amiga cómo un día, a raíz de un banal incidente, descubrió que su marido estaba entregado en cuerpo y alma a un amor secreto que lo consumía, y luego su vano intento por reconquistarlo. En la misma ciudad, una noche, el hombre que fue su marido confiesa a un amigo cómo dejó a su esposa por la mujer que deseaba desde años atrás, para después de casarse con ella perderla para siempre. Al alba, en una pequeña pensión romana, una mujer cuenta a su amante cómo ella, de origen humilde, se había casado con un hombre rico, pero el matrimonio había sucumbido al resentimiento y la venganza. Cual marionetas sin derecho a ejercer su voluntad, Marika, Péter y Judit narran su fallida relación con el crudo realismo de quien considera la felicidad un estado elusivo e inalcanzable

Un pequeño castillo de caza en Hungría, al pie de los Cárpatos, donde alguna vez se celebraron elegantes veladas y cuyos salones decorados al estilo francés se llenaban de la música de Chopin, ha cambiado radicalmente de aspecto. El esplendor de antaño ya no existe, todo anuncia el final de una época. Dos hombres mayores, que de jóvenes habían sido amigos inseparables, se citan a cenar tras cuarenta años sin verse. Uno ha pasado mucho tiempo en Extremo Oriente, el otro, en cambio, ha permanecido en su propiedad. Pero ambos han vivido a la espera de este momento, pues entre ellos se interpone un secreto de una fuerza singular. Todo converge en un duelo sin armas, aunque tal vez mucho más cruel, cuyo punto en común es el recuerdo imborrable de una mujer. En esta magistral novela, Sándor Márai plantea la búsqueda de la verdad como fuerza liberadora, como soporte ético imprescindible para sobrellevar el peso de una vida. La exactitud de su prosa, unida a la vigencia de sus propuestas morales, lo sitúa entre los grandes escritores europeos del siglo xx.

Sándor Márai, known for his novels like "Embers," initially gained acclaim as a poet and translator. This collection, translated by John Ridland and Peter V. Czipott, is the first English edition of Márai's poems, showcasing a comprehensive selection that highlights his mastery of poetry.

The novel Embers is selling in tens of thousand in a number of countries. The memoir of its author depicts Hungary between 1944 and 1948.

As darkness settles on a forgotten castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, two men sit down to a final dinner together. They have not seen one another in forty-one years. At their last meeting, in the company of a beautiful woman, an unspoken act of betrayal left all three lives shattered - and each of them alone. Tonight, as wine stirs the blood, it is time to talk of old passions and that last, fateful meeting.

What is it like to be in love with a pathological liar and fantasist? Esther is, and has been for more than 20 years. "Esther's Inheritance" presents a remarkable narrator who delivers a story as both tragedy and comedy.

It is midnight, October 31st 1758 and Giacomo Casanova has escaped from a Venetian prison after sixteen months consigned to darkness and the underworld. Shaking off the enforced solitude, Casanova makes his way Bolzano - the small village where he was dealt a cruel hand.

It is May 1918, and a group of boys are poised on the brink of adulthood. With war sweeping Europe, theirs has become a ghost town: fathers, uncles and older brothers have been called to the front; the trains that arrive through snow-capped mountains bear the living with the dead. As the boys’ graduation looms, so too does their fear of going to fight. Drawn together by the end of all that is familiar, yet repelled by what adulthood has come to represent, a small group of them invent a clandestine world. In their hideaway, with its codes, loves, jealousies, and own elaborate rules, these four test out their frustrations and their fears. Their games are darkly comic, wildly imaginative, increasingly subversive, and they attract the attention of a visitor to the town. By summer’s end, their secret is in ruins. The Rebels is a story of complicity and betrayal, of youthful exuberance and dawning responsibility. Another rediscovered gem from the great Hungarian author of Embers, it is a haunting novel that traces the experience of friends who confuse growing up with dying and adulthood with war, and are jolted forever from the final, irretrievable summer of their adolescence. ‘Elegiac, sombre, musical, and gripping, Embers is a brilliant disquisition on friendship' Observer