The Fawn-Fast Shipping

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From the author of The Door and Abigail and for fans of Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector, a newly translated novel about a theater star who is forced to reckon with her painful and tragic past.

In The Door, in Iza’s Ballad, and in Abigail,Magda Szabó describes the complex relationships between women ofdifferent ages and backgrounds with an astute and unsparing eye. Eszter,the narrator and protagonist of The Fawn, may well be Szabó’s most fascinating creation.

Eszteris an only child. She grows up in a provincial Hungarian town with herfather, an eccentric aristocrat and steeply downwardly mobile flowerbreeder, and her mother, a harried music teacher failing to make endsmeet, in the years before World War II. In postwar Communist Hungary,Eszter has moved to Budapest and become a star of the stage, but she hasforgotten no slight and forgiven nobody, least of all her too kind andbeautiful classmate Angela.

The Fawn unfolds as Eszter’s confession, filled with the rage of a lifetime andborn, we come to sense, of irreversible regret. It is a tale ofchildhood, of the theater, of the collateral damage of the riventwentieth century, of hatred, and, in the end, a tragic tale of love.