God is Late

A suspenseful novel about life in Hungary before the recent rebellion by one who knows what it was really like because she was there. In I Am Fifteen - And I Don't Want To Die this beautiful and talented author told the story of her own dramatic experiences in Hungary during and after the war. In this, her first novel, she tells what happens to a gay, frivolous woman, born only to give and receive pleasure, under the crushing, implacable Communist regime.

No one up to now has so vividly presented the lives of ordinary people under Communist rule in the satellite countries. This enthralling novel will shock you with its immediacy and touch you with its portrait of all-too-human men and women desperately struggling to survive under a totalitarian regime.

Since the war Gaby, her husband, and hated mother-in-law have been living on borrowed time - and they know it. Although, they have an apartment in Budapest, although Gaby's husband runs the Lyric Theater, and Gaby herself still can afford an occasional new dress and trip to the beauty parlor, they live in constant fear. A word from the new Commissar of the theater can destroy them. But he is attracted to Gaby - her delicate blondness has overcome his distaste for her bourgeois origins. And though she fears him, she dares not discourage him, nor does her husband dare take notice of the affair. Their very lives depend on its continuance.

When life in Budapest becomes too much for Gaby, she escapes on a visit to her sister, Anna, in the country. Once there, however, she is afraid to talk freely even with Anna, or Anna with her. Each fears the other has become a Communist. And so both women wait - and hope - only to have the impersonal malevolent state finally bring the problems of both their families to an inescapable solution.