Parallel Stories

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.

Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose Germanmother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr,whose influential father has served Hungary'sdifferent political regimes for decades; and AndrásRott, who has his own dark record of mysteriousactivities abroad. The web of extended andinterconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back tothe spring of 1939, when...