Shimmering Details, Volume I

"[Péter Nádas] interrogates his early life and family lore against a vibrant backdrop of 20th-century Budapest in the extraordinary first installment of his two-part memoir . . . Nádas consistently teases out surprising, thought-provoking associations between events . . . The rewards [of reading] are undeniable. This challenging and exceptional memoir affirms the author as a master of his craft." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Nádas, one of the greatest living writers, recognizes, on one hand, that there is no escape from or outside of history—its vast horrors and deep ironies—and simultaneously that the imaginative writer has a responsibility to subjectivity: the minute particulars of experience that are too fine-grained for the historian tracking the rise and fall of nations and empires." —Matthew Gasda, Compact

"Péter Nádas is the great surveyor of 20th-century European mental landscapes . . . One moment he is breathtakingly microscopic, offering a feast of details and nuances, and the next moment he is epochal and essayistic . . . An unsurpassable work of art." ―Iris Radisch, Die Zeit

"A firework of memories, in which each spark unfolds in its own luminosity and, above all, triggers further memories . . . [A] masterpiece . . . [Nádas is] one of the greatest writers of our time." ―Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung