Vera

Vera is an eleven-year-old whose life seems perfectly secure: she excels at school and at horse riding, and has loving parents. But in a matter of weeks, her world is turned upside down. One event leads to another in a chain reaction, too fast for Vera to understand them and her own reactions to them. How did her best friend become her mortal enemy? Why is it so exciting yet scary to spend time with the new arrival, Józef, the unruly Polish boy? And why do grown-ups have secrets, sometimes dirty, shameful and painful ones, if they insist on Vera telling the truth? Vera has to peel away many layers of silence until she learns who she really is. And in the end, it turns out that her family’s secrets and those suppressed by society at large share common roots. Krisztián Grecsó’s novel takes place in the provincial Hungarian town of Szeged, in 1980, against the backdrop of the stuffy world of the final, exhausted decade of socialism, with its overwhelming lies, corruption and nepotism. A favourite of Hungarian readers, Vera is a novel about adoption, first love, and a precocious child who is struggling to come to terms with her emerging self and with the reality around her.