An Exclusive Love

In this frank, tender and beautifully written true story, Austrian author Johanna Adorján explores the lives and deaths of her eccentric Jewish-Hungarian grandparents. After surviving Nazi persecution and Soviet occupation, the couple finally committed suicide when her grandfather fell ill so that one would never have to live without the other.  

Adorján portrays her grandparents as they really were: human beings with flaws. She describes her affable grandfather, a doctor and survivor of one of Austria’s most notorious concentration camps. Adorján paints a particularly vivid portrait of her grandmother, a strikingly beautiful woman who put on a show of confidence and charm while inside she was crippled by insecurity. A portrait emerges of a woman who was both arrogant and insecure, immensely loving and comically avaricious.

By interviewing family and friends, Adorján pieces together the life story which her grandparents were always reluctant to tell. Most of all she tries to understand what impelled them to take their own lives. Was it the strength of the love between them? Or her grandmother’s fear of being alone?

While Adorján refuses to idealise her grandparents or fall into the trap of cliché, her love for them is never far from the surface. With an impeccable translation by award-winning translator Anthea Bell, An Exclusive Love is powerfully moving without ever becoming sentimental.