Embers . . . Casanova in Bolzano . . . and now The Rebels: the third of the rediscovered novels of the great Hungarian writer—the jolting story of a troubled group of young men on the cusp of life, and death, in World War I. It is the summer of 1918. As graduation approaches at a boys’ academy in provincial Hungary, the senior class finds itself in a ghost town. Fathers, uncles, older brothers—all have been called to the front. Surrounded only by old men, mothers, aunts, and sisters, the boys are keenly aware that graduation will propel them into the army and imminently toward likely death on the battlefield. In the final weeks of the academic year, four of these young men—and the war-wounded older brother of one of them—are drawn tightly together, sensing in one another a mutual alienation from their bleak, death-mapped future. Soon they are acting out their frustrations and fears in a series of increasingly serious, strange, and subversive games and petty thefts. But when they attract the attention of a stranger in town—an actor with a traveling theater company—their games, and their lives, begin to move in a direction they could not have predicted and cannot control. *Starred Review* The third of the novels by this great Hungarian writer (whose fame in his native country reached its apogee in the 1930s, but who had to live out his later years in exile in the U.S., where he died in 1989) joins Embers (2000) and Casanova in Bolzano (2004) in being translated into English for the first time. Marai wrote historical fiction rooted in the politics, manners, and events of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. This particular novel is set specifically during World War I, in a small, provincial Hungarian town; most men in the community are absent at the front. A band of teenage boys, having just finished their schooling, face having to join their fathers somewhere in battle. But the friends themselves constitute their own army; the novel's title indicates their current modus operandi: rebelling against the adult social order in their small corner of the universe. Just as the army at the front functions as a unit, so does the gang of rebels; however, the author is interested in exploring not only their group mentality but also how, as distinct personalities, they operate not in concert. Rendered in sumptuous prose, this is a deeply penetrating novel of psychology. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “A darkly comic, war-ravaged coming-of-age tale that displays much of the genius visible in his later works, but [is] also funnier and more extravagantly imaginative.” — The New Yorker “The emotional power of the story is that of a simple, straightforward narrative . . . followed by stunning revelation.” — The Boston Globe “A morbidly comic novel . . . marked by passages of bleak elegiac grandeur.” — The New York Sun From the Trade Paperback edition. Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948. He went into exile, first in Italy, then in the United States. The actor had arrived in town with the company in the early autumn, saying he had had a contract in the capital first, but the theater had closed. He was forty-five years old but claimed to be thirty-five. Not even the gang believed this though they eagerly swallowed everything else he told them. He tended to play comic, dancing roles but referred to himself as a ballet instructor. The contract laid down that the company was obliged to supply divas and leading men each season for a few highlights from popular operettas. It was the comedian dancer’s task to teach them the appropriate elements of ballet. He had put on weight, developing a proper paunch and jowls, a rare thing in the world of comedians and dancers. The audience liked him because he included a lot of current gossip in his act. He wore a wig of light chestnut color. His head was large and equine. His jaw was thrust forward and he was so near-sighted that he couldn’t see the prompter’s box, but he refused to wear glasses out of vanity, not even in real life, as he put it. His stage name was Amadé: Amadé Volpay was how they billed him. He spoke with his mouth full as if chewing on a dumpling. He wore generously fitting, light suits that skillfully disguised his fatness as did his corset that was laced so tightly when he was on stage that his face was practically red, so that he didn’t look half as fat as he did in life. It was as if his girth were no more than some kind of misapprehension that existed between him and the world at large, and he never ceased talking about it. He spoke eloquently and at length to both intimates and strangers in the effort to persuade them that he was n