Publisher Description
From the author of The Door, a beloved coming-of-age tale set in WWII-era Hungary.
Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó's books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school's grounds has come to be called. If you're in trouble, it's said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.
Download and start listening now!
About Magda Szabó
Magda Szabo (1917–2007) was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary, in the midst of the great Hungarian plain. Szabo, whose father taught her to converse with him in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, and went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1944 and 1945. In 1947, she published two volumes of poetry, Barany (The Lamb), and Vissza az emberig (Return to Man), for which she received the Baumgartner Prize in 1949. Under Communist rule, this early critical success became a liability, and Szabo turned to writing fiction: her first novel, Fresko (Fresco), came out in 1958, followed closely by Az oz (The Fawn). In 1959 she won the Jozsef Attila Prize, after which she went on to write many more novels, among them Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969), Okut (The Ancient Well, 1970), Regimodi tortenet (An Old-Fashioned Tale, 1971), and Az ajto (The Door, 1987). Szabo also wrote verse for children, plays, short stories, and nonfiction, including a tribute to her husband, Tibor Szobotka, a writer and translator of Tolkien and Galsworthy who died in 1982. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen, Magda Szabo died in the town in which she was born, a book in her hand. In 2017 NYRB Classics will publish Iza s Ballad (1963).