Abigail
A teenage girl’s difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war.
Of all her novels, Magda Szabó’s Abigail is the most widely read in her native Hungary. Now, fifty years after it was written, it appears for the first time in English, joining Katalin Street and The Door in a loose trilogy about the impact of war on those who have to live with the consequences.
It is late 1943 and Hitler, exasperated by the slowness of his Hungarian ally to act on the “Jewish question” and alarmed by the weakness on his southern flank, is preparing to occupy the country. Concerned for his daughter’s safety, a Budapest father decides to send her to a boarding school away from the capital.
A lively, sophisticated, somewhat spoiled teenager, she is not impressed by the reasons she is given. When the school turns out to be fiercely Puritanical, in a provincial city a long way from home, she rebels. Her superior attitude offends her new classmates and things quickly turn sour.
It is the start of a long and bitter learning curve that will open her eyes to her arrogant blindness to other people’s true motives and feelings. Exposed for the first time to the realities of life for those less privileged than herself, and increasingly confronted by evidence of the more sinister purposes of the war, she learns lessons about the nature of loyalty, courage, sacrifice and love.
About the Author
Magda Szabó was a Hungarian novelist. Doctor of philology, she also wrote dramas, essays, studies, memoirs, poetry and children’s literature. She is a founding member of the Digital Literary Academy. She is the most translated Hungarian author, with publications in 42 countries and over 30 languages. Szabó died in 2007.
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