A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war. "A school story for
grownups that is also about our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH
MOSS "Of all Szabo's novels Abigail deserves the widest readership. It's an adventure story
brilliantly written" TIBOR FISCHER Of all her novels Magda Szabó's Abigail is indeed 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. Foreseeing this and
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 and when the school turns out to be a fiercely
Puritanical one in a provincial city a long way from home she rebels outright. 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.
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
