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When in 1705 Kornell Csillag’s grandfather returns destitute to his native Hungary from exile, he happens across a gold fob-watch gleaming in the mud. The shipwrecked fortunes of the Csillag family suddenly take a new and marvelous turn. The golden watch brings an unexpected gift to the future generations of firstborn sons: clairvoyance. Passed down from father to son, this gift offers the ability to look into the future or back into history – for some it is considered a blessing, for others a curse. No matter the outcome, each generation records its astonishing, vivid, and revelatory visions into a battered journal that becomes known as The Book of Fathers.
For three hundred years the Csillag family line meanders unbroken across Hungary's rivers and vineyards, through a land overrun by wolves and bandits, scarred by plague and massacre, and brutalized by despots. Impetuous, tenderhearted, and shrewd, the Csillags give birth to scholars and gamblers, artists and entrepreneurs. Led astray by unruly passions, they marry frigid French noblewomen and thieving alehouse whores. They change their name and their religion, and change them back. They wander from home but always return, and through it all The Book of Fathers bears witness to holocaust and wedding feast alike.
"Starred Review. Widely read in his homeland but rarely translated into English, Vámos should win a new American audience with his beautifully crafted novel of connection and continuity." - Kirkus Reviews
"A superb family saga that draws the reader effortlessly through nearly three centuries of turbulent history ....it records the political upheavals of an entire nation. The characters are fascinating and Vámos’s writing is a magnificent, seamless blend of the general and the personal." - The Times (UK)
"Magic realism is the first refuge of the unimaginative. Few besides Dickens, Marquez and Kafka can infuse slightly surreal characters with enough humanity to make us care about them. This might have been only a minor irritation if Vamos hadn't linked his story to actual horrific events in Jewish history. .... Vamos may be able to reconcile such scenes with his embarrassing insistence on astrology, synaesthesia, and magic nose powers. I can't." - The Guardian (UK)
"While the episodic structure can inspire a plodding feel, the book has many sublime moments, from meditations on the nature of time to a sly investigation of how words accumulate to form books." - Publishers Weekly
"Although readers will be swept up and entertained by the breadth of the family's history, they might end up wishing that Vámos had focused more on his relationship with his father, with Rajk's tragic story as a backdrop." - Library Journal
This information about The Book of Fathers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Miklós Vámos is one of the most respected and widely read writers in his native Hungary (where The Book of Fathers has sold over 200,000 copies). He is the author of twenty-eight books, eleven of them novels. He has taught at Yale University on a Fulbright fellowship, served as The Nation’s Eastern Europe correspondent, and was the host of a popular cultural TV talk show in Hungary. Today he is a correspondent for the Washington Post online. He is the father of three children, including a daughter who lives in London and five-year-old twin boys in Budapest.
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