On a freezing morning in Budapest, a young man stands on the Chain Bridge, watching snow dissolve into the black water below. He is broken, alone, and ready to jump. What saves him is not hope, but a story.
Snow on the Danube is a sweeping, darkly comic and deeply moving novel that unfolds across generations, from the glittering boulevards of pre war Budapest to its cellars, circuses, cafés and ruined bridges during the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
At its heart is Count Zoltán Pongrácz, the last of an ancient Hungarian family, a hypochondriac aristocrat born on the day Hungary lost its lands and its future. Fussy, musical, and obsessed with memory, Zoltán grows up amid lions, dolls’ houses, zoos and grand avenues, before history forces him into impossible choices. As fascism tightens its grip on Budapest, he must risk everything to save his beloved sister Anna, navigating forged papers, disguises, betrayals and desperate rescues as the city collapses around them.
Years later, in London, Zoltán’s troubled great nephew Béla inherits not money, but a manuscript. Reading it pulls him back into a world of beauty and terror: dancing by the Danube, walking along Andrássy Avenue, hiding in cellars, surviving bombardment, exile and loss. As Béla reads, his own life begins to change, lit by shafts of meaning from a past he never knew he carried.
By turns lyrical, unsettling and unexpectedly funny, Snow on the Danube is a novel about the stories families bury, the damage history inflicts, and the strange, redemptive power of art to keep us alive when everything else seems lost.