Train to Budapest

Set in 1956, this melancholic novel takes the reader on a journey across Europe. Florentine journalist Amara Sironi is commissioned to write a series of articles to try and find out 'how people really live beyond the Iron Curtain'. As she travels to Auschwitz and Budapest, it soon becomes apparent that she is also searching for something altogether more personal - her long lost childhood sweetheart, Jewish boy called Emanuele, who was sent to the Lodz ghetto in Poland and was never seen again.

Dacia Maraini deftly weaves historical fact and the individual stories of her characters into this narrative. In some ways this is a deeply personal novel, since Maraini herself spent three years of her childhood imprisoned in a concentration camp in Japan because her parents refused to support Mussoline's fascist government. She also wrote this book while her partner was dying of a long-term illness. Certainly Amara's sense of loss is palpable and although Maraini's authorial presence is strongly felt, she successfully strikes a delicate balance between the sadness, nostalgia and sense of powerlessness inherent in this turbulent period.

Although Silvester Mazarella's translation is not without its imperfections, he manages to render much of the tenderness and compassion of this novel which is ultimately not only about war, love, loss, but also about survival.