An exclusive love / Johanna Adorján ; translated by Anthea Bell.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Two people have grown old together. He is terminally ill, she doesn't want to live without him. One Sunday in autumn, they clean the apartment, leave the dog with a friend, and protect the rose-bushes against the cold of the coming winter. Then they are ready.



Tactfully and affectionately, Johanna Adorján has reconstructed the day of her grandparents' suicide. Vera and István were anything but ordinary. Chain-smoking and glamorous, they exuded the aura of a more elegant age. And they had a past which they did not discuss--even within the family. Decades ago they had fled disaster, started a new life in Denmark and--so it seemed--never looked back.



Sixteen years after her grandparents' death, Johanna Adorján sets out to fill the gaps of their story, in the process discovering unexpected things about herself and her family. Against the backdrop of the horrors of the 20th-century, she brings Vera and István back to life--a fascinating couple, peculiarly stylish, stubborn, eccentric. With an extraordinary blend of true reporting and novelistic recreation Johanna Adorján tries to understand their last and powerful act.



Beautifully written, tender but never sentimental, An Exclusive Love is a brilliantly-constructed memoir and a gorgeous romance, a tale of two people who died as they lived: inseparable.