Train to Budapest

by Dacia Maraini

Translated from the original Italian by Sylvester Mazzarella

1956: Amara, a young Italian journalist, is sent to report on the growing political divide between East and West in post-war central Europe. She also has a more personal mission: to find out what happened to Emanuele, her soul mate from before the war when both were children in Florence. Emanuele and his family were Jews transported by the Nazis from wartime Vienna, but not before he had sent Amara a long series of letters she still carries with her. Her quest now takes her on long train journeys. She visits the holocaust museum at Auschwitz, and Budapest, where she is caught up in the tumultuous events of the October rising against the Soviet Union. Amara is helped by chance travel companions, notably Hans, part Austrian and half-Jewish, who works as a surrogate father at weddings for brides orphaned in the war, and Hovath, an elderly Hungarian captured by the Russians after forced service with the German army outside Stalingrad in 1942. Along the way she meets many other survivors, each with their own story to tell, and ponders the troubled existence of her own parents in the oppressive world of Mussolini’s Italy. But did Emanuele survive the war or, like so many other Viennese Jews, did he die in Auschwitz or a ghetto in Poland?


(From Publisher).

Novelist, poet and playwright, Dacia Maraini has been awarded Italy's top two literary prizes, the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello. Her fiction, which has been published in 22 countries, includes Woman at War, Isolina, Voices and the worldwide best-seller The Silent Duchess. Darcia Maraini lives in Rome.

In 1956, the protagonist embarks on a journey through the countries behind the Iron Curtain. It is both a report and a trip down memory lane. We encounter unforgettable characters and stories from the Holocaust to the Hungarian Revolution.