"The Club at Eddy's Bar" by Zoltán Böszörményi with Hungarian Rhapsody, Ferenc Martyn drawing.
Here's the press release about the book and the author:
In the last years of the Cold War, the club at Eddy's Bar is a meeting place for the elite of an Eastern European city, especially those with more adventurous sexual tastes, which includes the apparently happily married mayor, several prominent lawyers and a hermaphrodite city administrator. When a young barber, who frequented the club and was involved with several of its members, is found brutally murdered and mutilated at the Hotel Odéon, many people have reason to be afraid.
A young journalist discovers the truth and is forced to leave his family and flee to Canada as a refugee, where he struggles to start a new life. He keeps the notebook in which he wrote his account of the crime, hoping to publish it if his family are ever allowed to join him. However, he finds that the people he meets in the new country are concealing as many dark secrets and lies as those in the old.
The Club at Eddy's Bar is both a gripping mystery and an intricate and involving tale of power, hypocrisy and betrayal.
Zoltán Böszörményi was born in the Hungarian community of Arad in Transylvania. While still a student, he published two books of Hungarian-language poetry. The second of these resulted in his arrest and interrogation by Romanian security officers. He fled across two borders and spent seven months in a refugee camp in Austria. He was admitted to Canada, where he learned English and graduated from York University in Toronto. After the opening up of Eastern Europe in the 90s, he returned and set up a successful lighting company in Romania. Now retired from manufacturing, he is Editor-in-Chief of a Hungarian-language daily journal and a monthly journal based in Arad. He has residences in Canada, Arad, and Monaco. In 2009 he received the Gundel Arts Award for the Hungarian version of The Club at Eddy's Bar, and in 2012 he received the József Attila Award for Hungarian literature. He is the author of two previous bestselling novels published in Hungary. He is married and has two daughters.
1 comment:
Karen - Thanks - I don't know nearly enough about Hungarian crime fiction. Perhaps I'll give this one a try.
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