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
