Be Faithful unto Death

Be Faithful Unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments through which he goes - and grows - are superbly described, and Stephen Vizinczey's new translation unleashes the full power of Moricz's prose.

First published in 1921, the novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Moricz knew so well, and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary. Yet the quality of the experience captured here is universal. The author's uncanny ability to rediscover for us precisely what it feels like to be that child makes this portrait of the artist as a young boy not merely a Hungarian but a European classic.