Description

Back from Troy, the ‘divine’ Helen looks with fresh eyes at her foul-mouthed hero-husband; a girl in a mountain village seeks reassurance about her arranged marriage; a drunken mandarin invites the devil to tea; and a German princess discovers that people actually drink goat’s milk. These delightful tales exhibit Banffy’s customary blend of high seriousness and subtle humour, his rich imagination and his remarkably wide-ranging sympathies.

Appearing in English for the first time, in finely nuanced translations by the prize-winning Len Rix, The Enchanted Night furthers the writer’s growing reputation as one of the most compelling European writers of the twentieth century.

Publisher Review

- 'The Tolstoy of Transylvania... Banffy's trilogy is just about as good as any fiction I have ever read' - Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph - 'The elegiac wisdom of his writing makes him one of those people whose life you wish could have ended in something other than calamity... a great storyteller' - Guardian - 'A genuine case of a rediscovered classic. The force of Banffy's enthusiasm produces an effect rather like that of the best Trollope novels, but coming from a past world that now seems excitingly exotic' - Times Literary Supplement - 'Banffy's masterpiece resembles Proust, [yet] he writes with all the psychological acumen of Dostoevsky' - The London Magazine