Book description
"An absolute treat, deliciously ludic, to be read with
a big smile on your face throughout."-Nicholas Lezard,
Guardian
AT THE END-OF-LONDON-SEASON soiree, the young
Hungarian scholar-dilettante Janos Batky is introduced to the Earl
of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange
rumours. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North
Wales, Batky receives a mysterious phone-call warning him not to go.
But he does, and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism and
romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to
solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways-old
libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains and underground tombs.
ANTAL SZERB was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of
Jewish descent. Graduating in German and English, he rapidly established
himself as a prolific scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry,
studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English, Hungarian, and
world literature. His first novel, The Pendragon Legend, was written in
1934. Journey by Moonlight appeared in 1937, followed in 1943 by The
Queen's Necklace and various volumes of novellas. He died in the
forced-labour camp at Balf in January 1945. LEN RIX was born in
Zimbabwe, where he took a degree in languages, before reading English at
Cambridge. His remarkable renderings of Antal Szerb's The Pendragon
Legend, Journey by Moonlight , Oliver VII and Love in a Bottle have seen
him shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Price and awarded
the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
