Sándor Márai Books in Order

Sándor Márai is a renowned Hungarian writer and journalist. Born in Kassa, Austria-Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), to a prominent Saxon family with centuries-old ties to the Magyars, Márai's ancestral heritage is deeply intertwined with Hungarian history. A global citizen at heart, he spent his early years in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris, briefly considering German as a writing language before opting for his mother tongue, Hungarian. In 1928, he settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, where he flourished as a literary force in the 1930s with his distinctive realist style, becoming the first to critique Kafka's work. Márai's complex views on politics, particularly his antifascist stance during wartime Hungary, made him a daring and principled writer. With an impressive output of forty-six books, mostly novels, he is regarded as one of Hungary's most influential chroniclers of middle-class life between the world wars. His works, including the poignant novel Embers (1942), evoke a bittersweet nostalgia for the lost multicultural society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.