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Tóth's collection is an excellent and accessible new addition to the growing number of Hungarian texts translated into English. - LA Review of Books Krisztina Tóth's first substantial work in prose after four volumes of remarkable verse, consists of fifteen beautifully written and highly sensual short stories. Most are narrated with poetic intensity and intimacy from a young, unnamed female narrator's point of view. Whether about childhood acquaintances, school camps and trips, or love and deceit in love, they are all are set against the backdrop of Hungary's socialist era in its declining years. The stories are carefully strung, like jewels in a necklace, along metaphorical 'lines', as in the title of the collection and the subtitle of the pieces. The losses, disappointments, and tragedies great and small recounted here offer nuanced 'mirrorings' of the female soul and linger long in the memory.

About the Author :
Krisztina Tóth is one of Hungary's most respected, popular and accomplished writers and an outspoken public intellectual, engaged particularly with the struggle for women's rights and the increasingly severe limits on cultural autonomy in Hungary. Her first collection, published at the age of 22, won the Radnóti prize and she has since garnered a dozen or more major awards for her poetry, prose and (often taboo-breaking) books for children. Her prose is as outstanding as her poetry: she has helped to define the character of both genres in contemporary Hungary. She is also a translator and critic, particularly of French literature, while being widely translated herself: 26 books in 15 languages. In English, some dozen short stories and a volume of prose (Pixel, tr. Owen Good, 2019) are available, while such distinguished poets as George Szirtes and David Hill have published numerous outstanding versions of her poems. Peter Sherwood studied Hungarian and linguistics in the University of London before being appointed, in 1972, to a lectureship in Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London). He taught there until 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014 he was László Birinyi, Sr., Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Peter Sherwood received the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize of the Hungarian Republic for contributions to Anglo-Hungarian relations in 2001, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007, the János Lotz medal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies in 2011, the László Országh prize of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English in 2016, and the Árpád Tóth Prize for Translation in 2020.