About the Author

Count Miklós Bánffy (1873-1950) was a Hungarian nobleman with extensive estates in Hungarian Transylvania (now Romania). He was the first patron of composer Béla Bartók and briefly Hungarian foreign minister after World War I. His castle and great library were deliberately destroyed by the retreating Nazis in 1944.

Reviews

“The Transylvanian Trilogy is worth every penny. Set during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Europe as a whole is slipping toward a cataclysmic war, it’s a saga of shortsighted politics and illicit love, of progressivism at loggerheads with entrenched interests, of servants outfoxing their masters—all kept in breathtaking balance by the power of the author’s artistry." —Washington Post (Notable Fiction of 2013)  

"A genuine case of a rediscovered classic. The force of Bánffy’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 (London)

"Bánffy’s masterpiece resembles Proust’s, [yet] he writes with all the psychological acumen of Dostoevsky." –The London Magazine

"As good as any fiction I have ever read. . . . Like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sec, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos a society which cannot prevent its own destruction." –Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph

"So enjoyable, so irresistible, it is the author’s keen political intelligence and refusal to indulge in self-deception which give it unusual distinction. It’s a novel that, read at the gallop for sheer enjoyment, is likely to carry you along. But many will want to return to it for a second, slower reading to savour its subtleties and relish the author’s intelligence." –The Scotsman

"Fascinating. He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz brings to the contemplation of this lost Eden." –The Guardian