Publisher's Synopsis
'I don't know when I've read a more perfect novel - a dynamically helpless hero (in the line of Kafka), and a gorgeous spiral of action, nothing spare, nothing wrong, inventive and without artifice.' - Michael Hoffman TLS
A linguist flying to a conference in Helsinki has landed in a strange city where he can't understand a word anyone says.
As one claustrophobic day follows another, he wonders why no one has found him yet, whether his wife has given him up for dead, and how he'll get by in this society that looks so familiar, yet is so strange.
In a vision of hell, unlike any previously imagined, Budai must learn to survive in a world where words and meaning are unconnected.
This is a suspenseful and haunting Hungarian classic.
