****Washington Post Best Books of 2013**
**
The celebrated TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY by Count Miklós Bánffy is a
stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian
aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first
discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in
Hungary, Bánffy's novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical
acclaim and appear here for the first time in hardcover.
They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, the second and third
novels in the trilogy, continue the story of the two aristocratic
cousins introduced in They Were Counted as they navigate a dissolute
society teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Count Balint Abády, a
liberal politician who defends his homeland's downtrodden Romanian
peasants, loses his beautiful lover, Adrienne, who is married to a
sinister and dangerously insane man, while his cousin László loses
himself in reckless and self-destructive addictions. Meanwhile, no one
seems to notice the gathering clouds that are threatening the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and that will soon lead to the brutal
dismemberment of their country. Set amid magnificent scenery of wild
forests, snowcapped mountains, and ancient castles, THE TRANSYLVANIAN
TRILOGY combines a Proustian nostalgia for a lost world, insight into a
collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama
and epic sweep of Tolstoy.