Magda Szabo was born in Debrecen, eastern Hungary, in 1917, and began her working life as a teacher. From 1949 onwards her work was banned, but she burst onto the literary scene in 1958 with the publication of Fresco and The Dawn. The Fawn was first published in 1959, Katalin Street in 1969 and Abigail in 1970. In 1987, publication of The Door brought her international recognition and was the winner of the Prix Femina and the Mondello Prize. She died in 2007. In 2016 The Door was chosen as Best Book of the Year by the New York Times.
In Katalin Street, the past is never dormant, never settled. The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. In describing Henriette's plight, Szabo writes: 'From the moment she arrived she had been left to work out the rules and the customs of the place entirely by herself.' In this extraordinary novel, the same could be said for the living. - New York Times Book ReviewKatalin Street's effect on me was so extraordinary that at first I couldn't decide what was most extraordinary about it: its gentle unpeeling of the tragic lives of the characters, or its gentle unpeeling of tragic life in general . . . quite unforgettable - Daily TelegraphThis is a love story and a ghost story . . . From the height of war through to Stalinism, the 1956 Hungarian uprising and its 1968 reprise, Szabo moves us across the decades. - The Arts DeskA gorgeous elegy for the joy and the life once shared among three neighboring families in prewar Budapest...This is a brilliant and unforgettable novel. - Publishers Weekly (starred review)Szabo's quietly captivating novel excavates the tangled history of Hungary's capital from the portentous moments before the German occupation to its suffocating postwar regime...A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime. - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)[Katalin Street] is a brightly shining star in the Szabo universe, offering us a glimpse of Eastern Europe at a time when we need to be reminded of what happened there more than ever - World Literature TodayHer fiction shows the travails of modern Hungarian history from oblique but sharply illuminating angles . . . Szabo summons the cosy, closed world with a lyrical, quicksilver touch that makes the thuggish intrusions of despotic power all the more wrenching. - Economist[U]nusual, piercing, and - given Hungary's current political climate - oddly percipient - Irish Times
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