The Enchanted Night

Enthralling stories from the celebrated author of The Transylvanian Trilogy 'A great storyteller' Guardian Back from Troy, the 'divine' Helen looks with fresh eyes at her foul-mouthed hero-husband; a girl in a mountain village seeks reassurance about her arranged marriage; a drunken mandarin invites the devil to tea; and a German princess discovers that people actually drink goat's milk. These delightful tales exhibit Bánffy's customary blend of high seriousness and subtle humour, his rich imagination and his remarkably wide-ranging sympathies. Appearing in English for the first time, in finely nuanced translations by the prize-winning Len Rix, The Enchanted Night furthers the writer's growing reputation as one of the most compelling European writers of the twentieth century.

Count Miklós Bánffy was born in 1873 in Kolozsvár in what was then Hungarian Transylvania. A brilliant polymath, he studied law, music and painting, became a noted stage and set designer, wrote plays, short stories and novels, and served as his country's foreign minister. During the Second World War he urged both his own and the Romanian governments to withdraw their support for Germany: in revenge the retreating Wehrmacht looted and burned his estate. After the Soviet occupation he was declared a 'class enemy' and had to wait until 1949 before, penniless and in broken health, he was allowed to rejoin his family in Budapest. He died a year later.