The Pendragon Legend

By: Antal Szerb, Len Rix (Translator)

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Paperback | 1 October 2024

At a Glance

Paperback
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 12.9 x 1.91

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While visiting a Welsh castle, a young scholar finds himself at the center of occult rituals and a murder mystery in this "absolute treat" of a gothic detective story (The Guardian)

At an end-of-the London season soiree, the young Hungarian scholar-dilettante Janos Batky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumors. Invited to the family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales, Batky receives a mysterious phone-call warning him not to go. But go he does, plunging him into a bizarre world of mysticism and romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways-old libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains and underground tombs.

The Pendragon Legend is Antal Szerb's first novel and is a gently satirical blend of gothic and romantic genres, crossed with the murder mystery format to produce a fast-moving and often hilarious romp. But beneath the surface, the reader becomes aware of a steely intelligence probing moral, psychological, and religious questions.

Industry Reviews

'May Szerb's entry into our literary pantheon be definitive' - Alberto Manguel

'A writer of immense subtlety and generosity... Can literary mastery be this quiet-seeming, this hilarious, this kind? Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers' - Ali Smith

'Szerb is a master novelist whose powers transcend time and language' - Nicholas Lezard

'Szerb was fluent in German and English and greatly interested in unusual religious beliefs. His knowledge of Rosicrucianism and the occult informs this often very funny book, which takes many affectionate potshots at the period's popular fiction. Szerb, who produced a history of English literature, knew his Shakespeare, Blake and Milton, but also the frothier writings of John Buchan, Edgar Wallace and P G Wodehouse' - Paul Bailey

'An academic jeu d'esprit.... with teasing pastiches of John Cowper Powys, P. G. Wodehouse... and the early, comic fiction of Aldous Huxley' - Sam Sacks

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