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This book revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous excursion on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. The highly regarded British travel writer and heroic wartime Special Operations Executive officer walked into Hungary as a youth of 19 at Easter and left Transylvania in August 1934. This intrepid traveler, "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" as the New York Times obituary put it in 2011, published his experiences half a century later. Between the Woods and the Water, that covers the part of the epic foot journey from the middle Danube to the Iron Gates, has been a bestseller since it was first published in 1986. In the present volume Michael O'Sullivan reveals the identity of the interesting characters in the travelogue, interviewing several of them eyetoeye. The many counts and barons among his 1934 contacts are a proof of Leigh Fermor's lifelong attraction to the aristocracy. Rich with photos and other documents on places and persons both from the thirties and today, the book offers a compelling social and political history of the period and the area. It provides a particular portrait of Hungary and Transylvania when they were on the brink of momentous change.

A novel of growing up a Hungarian in Romania under Communism.
 
In the novel Story of a Stammer, Gábor Vida asks a fundamental question: Where does stammering come from? In the process of answering this question, he discovers that an entire historical period and an entire world have been stammering, too. Through Vida’s eyes, we see that stammering comprises all the lies accumulated over time and over generations because nobody had ever articulated what they felt or thought, nor done what they really wanted. Nobody, Vida shows, had ever told the truth.
 
Describing life in the 1970s and ’80s under Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu’s authoritarian regime, Vida writes with disarming honesty, breaking taboos and chronicling the ways in which tyranny and exploitation seep into family relationships. The novel charts the first two decades of a young Hungarian man’s life in Romania, telling a story of coming to terms with a stammer, loneliness, and an unstimulating environment where religion, alcoholism, and suicide are the most common escape strategies. A Bildungsroman, a novel about Transylvania, a chronicle of minority life, a sociological analysis of cultural identity, and ultimately a deeply personal account of a historical era, Story of a Stammer is a major contribution to contemporary Hungarian literature—an unfailingly serious yet humorously delightful witness to a turbulent period in recent history.