Return to Budapest

Márta grows up in socialist Budapest, by Lake Balaton, where she spends glorious summers with her cousin Theresa. But without Theresa, it’s lonely, and as soon as she has finished school, Márta flees her alcoholic father and travels to be with Theresa in East Berlin. There, she is introduced to the world of bohemian artists. She visits dingy apartments and hangs out in smoke-filled bars, and attends a reading by the young dissident writer Konstantin.

He is dashing, mysterious, tortured. Both girls fall in love with him, and of course, the extroverted and self-assured Theresa comes out on top – until a twist of fate leads to her arrest. Between the two left behind, a dangerous intimacy emerges, a sense of betrayal that will continue to haunt Márta decades later. But had they not all been equally at fault? And will she ever manage to step out of Theresa’s shadow?

In evocative language, Nikoletta Kiss tells of an intense friendship between two women, and of a love triangle in the heady days before the fall of the Berlin Wall – of old wounds and of the realisation that it is never to late to heal them.