Benci, Irene, and their four children live in Budapest, Hungary. In the fall of 1956, they find themselves, along with the rest of the country, caught in a revolution that is ignited by young men and women. Fed up with a communist regime that has ruled since World War II, they march in protest, determined to rid their city of total control from a government with no conscience. Because Benci is a former soldier and a college professor, his life is threatened if he doesnt report for duty to fight his fellow citizens. Ignoring those orders, Benci and his family prepare to flee. Hundreds have already died in what started as peaceful demonstrations. A neighbors twelve-year-old son is killed for the crime of looking out a window. Their neighbors look to Benci for guidance. He is a man who is a world-champion fencer, which has earned him a celebrity status among his countrymen. Reluctantly, he takes on the challenge to lead about two dozen citizensmen, women, and children. Along the way, they face death several times and a frightening walk across a swaying bridge made of nothing more than planks and rope. Keeping the children safe and protected from the realities of their situation becomes the harshest, most emotional role Irene has ever played as a mother. Irenes entire world has always been devoted to her childrenMara, ten; Vera, eight; Andow, seven; and Gari, five. Now more than ever, they need her the most. Once they arrive safely in Austria, everyone rejoicesthat is, whoever is still alive. Of the two dozen who started out on this long journey, only fifteen remain. Irene cannot share the jubilations; she is heartbroken. Their freedom forced her to abandon her homeland and forsake her family, especially her mother, Gitta, who proclaimed that she was too old to make such a journey. My slowing you down could end in disaster for you and the children. No, its better that I stay here. The story continues until the children are young men and women. Because of Irenes fear of strangers due to years of not being able to trust anyone, she refuses to attend functions at Rutgers University, where Benci is employed. She will not allow a stranger to babysit her children, which leads to a bitter divorce; and Irene, though devastated, never accepts any responsibility for the failed marriage.

A gripping story of endurance and the will to survive while facing the menace of a vile regime.The Soviet Union is approaching its endgame, when a couple make the bold decision to seek a better and safer life in the west. Doubts arise and are argued away until the groundwork is complete and seemingly foolproof. A minor and unforeseen flaw along the way throws panic and uncertainty into the planned journey, but there is no going back. Unexpected and truly surprising encounters make the attempted flight to freedom a fascinating and nail-biting drama.

DANUBE DEFIANCE, by critically appraised novelist JANE GOLDEN, is an enthralling mystery about an art heist involving ancient icon art. Travel with super sleuth, Jeni, as she ventures through the antique markets in New Orleans' French Quarter and across the ocean to Eastern Europe's bustling city of Bucharest and the Romanian countryside. Jeni stumbles upon one clue that leads to others. Something doesn't add up, and she gathers a few friends... an antiquities expert, a journalist, and a dashing New Orleans shopkeeper. Together, they follow a river of clues and dead bodies. But will the thieves get them first? Read to find out! CLARION REVIEW: "Golden's first-hand knowledge of Romania is fascinating." BLUEINK REVIEW: "Nothing makes an overworked genre like mystery seem quite so fresh as a story set in an exotic locale. SECRETS IN THE VINES takes this theory to heart, offering up a murder mystery set in the wine country surrounding Romania. It's a winning formula." "Author Jane Golden drew on her own time in Bucharest to set up this tale, and it pays off nicely. Observations about the life of a foreigner trying to make sense of a new culture are spot-on and often funny; thoughts about parking customs and the laconic pace of government reflect an outsider's tendency to compare things to life at home, while also taking us deeper into the atmosphere. The mystery is gripping, but it's the setting that steals the show." The review concludes with this about SECRETS IN THE VINES: It has a "terrific pacing and a plot that ends well." Better yet, the reviewer states that "we're left wanting more of this juicy escapism." KIRKUS REVIEWS: "An engaging mystery that turns the classic expatriate dream on its head." Marian Petrutza, President of the Romanian-American Press Association: "The perfect vacation book.... Colorful, entertaining, and beautifully written."

In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Peter Esterhazy blends magic realism and travel narrative to dazzling effect. Esterhazy's hero is a professional Traveller, commissioned -- like Marco Polo by Kubla Khan -- to undertake a voyage of discovery and to prepare a travelogue about the Danube. Communicating his experiences through terse -- and at times surreal -- telegrams to his employer, the Traveller weaves a rich tapestry of narratives, evoking the dreamlike past and the precarious present of a disappearing world. Moving from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, Esterhazy takes the reader on a fascinating European journey of the imagination, down the Danube River, through Vienna, Budapest, and beyond the delta where the mighty river empties into the sea. Filled with allusion, fable, fantasy, history, and autobiography, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) is Peter Esterhazy at his scintillating, adventurous best.

A gripping personal story that is also the dramatic story of 20th century Hungary, with foreword by the President of Hungary, Arpad Goncz.

Germany's invasion of Hungary in 1944 marked the end of a culture that had dominated Central Europe from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. In this poignant memoir, Charles Farkas offers a testament to this vanished way of life—its society, morality, personal integrity, wealth, traditions, and chivalry—as well as an eyewitness account of its destruction, begun at the hands of the Nazis and then completed under the heel of Soviet Communism. Farkas's recollections of growing up in Budapest, a city whose grandeur embraced—indeed spanned—the Danube River; his vivid descriptions of everyday life in Hungary before, during, and after World War II; and his ultimate flight to freedom in the United States remind us that behind the larger historical events of the past century are the stories of the individual men and women who endured and, ultimately, survived them.

Morgan Duma has always known she's different. Her eyes have unusual gold rings around her irises, a trait she's inherited from her father. She's faster and stronger than most. Her endurance and stamina allow her to complete tasks in a quick and efficient fashion. Since she was a little girl, she knew there was only one man for her Adam Varga. & ;& ;Morgan learned to dance in Adam's arms. They grew up playing the piano together. Adam's calm, soothing presence was the perfect complement to her restless soul. Not only that, he shared her differences down to his feral eyes. & ;& ;Enter Zoltan Kristos, Hungary's Minister of Reconstruction He shares those same golden eyes that Morgan possesses. After Zoltan carries her mother's injured body out of a blazing fire, Morgan's life takes a turn she doesn't expect. Morgan discovers the reasons for her differences, and questions her very identity. Is Adam strong enough to be the man she needs him to be? & ;

In the hands of the twentieth century's most innovative dramatists, characters have revealed their identities on stage in a variety of unconventional ways: they speak with electronic voices or engage in solipsistic monologues; they are lost in self-conscious third-person forms of communicating or are expressed simply as movement, sound, and decor. Missing Persons is a study of character and its representation on the modern stage. Within broad literary contexts, William E. Gruber addresses specific questions about the dramatis personae of the playwrights Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Maria Fornes. Among the questions Gruber considers are why mechanical actors or the abrupt dislocations of oriental acting styles meant so much to dramatists as different as Brecht and Craig; why figures in Beckett's late plays are so often flat, schematized, heraldic; and why such contemporary dramatists as Fornes and Bernhard share a profound fascination with the mechanics of theatrical representation - quoting, reciting, reproducing, or impersonating an absent text. The figures who move across these stages are frail, contradictory, occasionally mutilated, or even dismembered. They are grim reminders, says Gruber, that the individual's place in the world is not as secure or as central as we imagine it once was. "Yet character", Gruber argues, "remains for these authors a crucial element of drama, even if it is more fragile, more ghostly, more enigmatic than ever before". The study of character as a crucial component of drama has been neglected for much of this century. Missing Persons attempts to restore "character" to the current discourse by developing a vocabularyfor discussing it in plays in which conventional terms seem insufficient or irrelevant. Drawing on evidence from five dramatists whose work has long been considered antagonistic toward character - as the term has typically been understood - Gruber maintains that modern drama is never anticharacter even when it is most aggressively antirealist and suggests that "character" remains a defining ideal throughout the modern and postmodern period, especially among dramatists who seem deliberately to have forsaken it.