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Nelio Biedermann was born in Zurich in 2003, which means he wrote this multigenerational saga of Hungarian aristocratic collapse, wartime complicity, Soviet expropriation, and inherited cowardice at an age when most writers are still workshopping their first short story about a difficult childhood. He is currently studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.

Lázár was published in Germany in 2025, won the Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award, and is being translated into more than twenty languages.

The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century on the feast of Epiphany, when Baroness Mária von Lázár gives birth to a boy so translucent that the country doctor can see his organs working beneath the skin. (A metaphor for a family whose secrets are about to become very visible?)

The infant, Lajos, was fathered by Pál, the water-blue-eyed stable groom, a biographical detail that Mária preserves through an act of intellectual athleticism. She trains herself to lie by lying constantly, practicing falsehood on every question from dinner menus to existential ones, until the truth begins to feel to her like an affectation.

When Baron Sándor, proud, moustached, and constitutionally incurious, finally asks whether the boy is really his, Mária calmly informs him that the child bears a striking resemblance to the dynasty's mythological founder, Hayo the First, a man so remote in history that there is no surviving portrait to contradict her. The aristocracy has always known that the great advantage of long lineage is the total absence of living witnesses.

Around this transparent child orbits a great household cast. There is Ilona, Lajos's scheming elder sister, whose talent for strategic devastation manifests early and only deepens with practice. There is Uncle Imre, who after their father vanishes into the surrounding forest, discovers E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" by mysterious delivery and retreats so thoroughly into its gothic universe that Sándor eventually has him painted into the blue room, quite literally, the walls of which are the colour of sedation. There is the young tutor Jonathan, who leaves scented poems under Persian carpets, church pews, and rosebeds, apparently operating on the theory that the entire manor house is a suitable letter box for his desires, with consequences that are swift and violent. And there is, of course, Mária.

Lajos grows up luminous, sensitive, and hungry for escape, dreaming obsessively of great ships crossing open water. He meets Lilly Grünfeld, a Viennese Jewish girl with blue teardrop earrings that belonged to her dead mother, and loves her with the precision only the very young mistake for permanence. They build a life of champagne terraces, leather car seats, and summers on the Côte d'Azur.

Outside their windows, Europe gets progressively uglier, but ugliness at a sufficient distance has always been compatible with a good wine list. When the Germans occupy Hungary in 1944, Lajos organises the registration, labelling, ghettoisation, and deportation of three thousand five hundred Jews from Pécs to Auschwitz, and then stands under a linden tree smoking, watching the funeral procession his own paperwork helped assemble, feeling privately terrible in a way that costs him exactly nothing.

He also hides an anti-Nazi chaplain named Pontiller in the western wing of his manor house. Biedermann gives Lajos the moral complexity of allowing him to do both.

The novel's third movement belongs to Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, who inherits the family's water-blue eyes and its gift for loving people whose fate is already sealed.

His story carries the book through the Soviet takeover, Communist expropriation, the 1956 uprising, and a final departure by train that closes the century with compressed weight.

Biedermann aptly suggests that cowardice travels down a bloodline as reliably as cheekbones and good silver. The opposite of moral courage is very rarely screaming cruelty. It is, far more often, a man who looks at the ground to avoid standing out, who performs one small private act of decency and uses it to forgive himself for the much larger public act of doing what the regime requires.

That this argument has applications extending well beyond 1944 Hungary is not the novel's subtext. It is the novel's entire point.

For a writer born in 2003, the command of chronology, register, and moral architecture is alarming. The prose, in Jamie Bulloch's English translation, has the rhythmic confidence of someone who has read Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, Huysmans and Stefan Zweig with genuine hunger and then metabolised rather than imitated them. The long sentences that suddenly snap shut on a single short one. The chapter that is one single sinuous paragraph of a woman walking toward water. The sixty chapters that collectively constitute a persuasive argument against the comfortable life.

The Lázárs are glass people in the end, each generation as transparent as that first infant born on Epiphany. If you look carefully, you can see every one of their organs working, and several of them are malfunctioning in ways the family has spent a century pretending are perfectly normal.

Reading "Lázár" is the experience of being handed a perfectly polished lens and invited to look, first at them, and then, with the lens still raised, at whatever is directly behind you.

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London, 1886. Mr Utterson, a lawyer of studied dullness conducting his Sunday walks in companionable silence, hears a tale from his kinsman Enfield about a small, repellent man named Edward Hyde who trampled a child in the predawn streets and paid off the witnesses with a cheque bearing the signature of one of London's most celebrated physicians.

The physician is Dr Henry Jekyll, holder of enough honorary letters after his name to fill a small almanac, and Utterson is alarmed to discover that Jekyll's will leaves his entire estate to this same Hyde, in the event of Jekyll's death or unexplained disappearance.

Utterson suspects blackmail and fears something worse, and sets out to find Hyde. What he finds is a figure so off-putting that every witness struggles to describe him. Dwarfish, deformed without a specifiable defect, radiating malevolence.

Hyde keeps a key to Jekyll's back door, draws on his accounts, and occupies a house in Soho, where fog thickens to umber. Sir Danvers Carew, an elderly MP of impeccable reputation, is beaten to death with a cane Utterson once gave Jekyll, and Hyde vanishes. Jekyll retreats from the world, appearing at a window briefly before terror closes his expression and the frame.

Dr Lanyon, once Jekyll's oldest colleague and by this point a broken man, dies weeks after witnessing something he declined to commit to paper, leaving Utterson a sealed document with instructions to hold it until Jekyll's death or disappearance. Both conditions are swiftly fulfilled.

What awaits Utterson and his locksmith inside Jekyll's cabinet is a scene of controlled devastation, a will rewritten in Jekyll's own hand, and two documents that promise at last to explain what Hyde truly is, where he came from, and what the word "disappearance" was always intended to cover.

Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in ten feverish days in 1885, reportedly burning a first draft at his wife Fanny's insistence and producing the version we have in another ten.

The speed shows, and so does the compression. The book is closer to a novella than a novel. Its central idea is too explosive to survive the sprawl of three volumes and a subplot about an inheritance.

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Latimer Grant is a young Victorian man too sensitive for banking, too inarticulate for poetry, too pale for fox-hunting, and possessed of an absolutely catastrophic gift. After a grave illness in Geneva he discovers he can read other people's minds, involuntarily and always at the worst moment. The thoughts of every acquaintance flood his skull like an orchestra tuning permanently, except those of one person.

That one exception is Bertha Grant, a blond, sharp-eyed creature with the warmth of a marble medallion and the conversational style of a dagger wrapped in silk. She alone remains a mystery to him, and because he can hear every other soul on the continent, her closed mind is the most intoxicating thing he has ever encountered. He falls for her with full fervour.

Latimer's brother Alfred, whose inner life consists almost entirely of self-congratulation and equestrian enthusiasm, is already engaged to Bertha. Latimer watches the courtship from inside Alfred's own satisfied skull, which is precisely as awful as it sounds. But Eliot, who has the timing of a superior card-player, arranges Alfred's exit from the story via a horse, a hill, and a concussion, leaving the estate, the income, and the inconvenient question of Bertha's future all to be resolved by a cold April morning and a wedding that the groom has already foreseen in a vision so terrible he shuddered for days.

The marriage is, to no one's surprise except the guests, a sustained and expert catastrophe. Bertha, once legally secured, drops the mystique she wore like a borrowed hat, and Latimer's gift operates on her fully at last: what he finds inside that elegant skull is contempt so thorough it constitutes a kind of artistry.

They inhabit the same house, she brilliant at dinner parties, he shrinking from his own servants whose petty thoughts assault him around the clock. Then a disquieting maid named Mrs. Archer appears, and a visiting doctor named Meunier proposes to conduct a rather unconventional medical experiment on a dying woman. The results of that experiment will surface a secret so cold and specific that even a man who can read minds will be thunderstruck to hear it spoken aloud.

George Eliot wrote "The Lifted Veil" in 1859 while simultaneously being one of the most formidable intellects in Victorian England and a woman who published under a man's name because the era trusted trousers more than talent. Mary Ann Evans chose her pen name because she knew exactly how thick the veil over women's minds was kept by respectable society, which gives the story's central metaphor a unique biographical edge.

Total knowledge of another person destroys the very thing that makes love possible. Latimer can hear every soul except Bertha's, and that silence is what he worships. The moment the veil lifts and her inner life floods in, what remains is a cold room with bad wallpaper.

Eliot compresses seven years of marital ruin into a few paragraphs. There is genuinely little to say about misery that compounds daily. Every era produces people who fall in love with their own projections. The Victorian corset merely gave the delusion better posture. Today the same mechanism runs on curated social media profiles, which are just flashy veils.

Foreknowledge offered Latimer precisely zero protection against desire. He absorbed the warning, shuddered appropriately, and proceeded regardless, which is what people have always done with good advice. My advice to you is to read this short genius work.

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Luke Rhinehart, the pen name of George Cockcroft, published "The Dice Man" in 1971 as a mock autobiography, a form chosen with full satirical intent. The book claims to be the confessions of a great man who will be misunderstood, and it proceeds to make that prediction come spectacularly true.

Rhinehart the character tells us in the preface that his style will be random, that distortions will be embraced, and that a well-told lie is a gift of the gods, then asks us to take everything that follows seriously. A text about the dissolution of the self that keeps dissolving its own reliability.

A bored psychiatrist, sitting at a poker table after midnight in 1968 New York, decides to let a die govern his actions. The first command is rape. Rhinehart goes downstairs, announces his intention to his neighbour Arlene Ecstein with flat sincerity, and she, after some negotiation, cooperates.

Here the book lays its most provocative card on the table, face up and grinning. The treatment of sexual assault as a zany domestic caper is a genuine moral failure, one that the novel wears with nonchalance as a philosophical position. It is not. It is a period artefact, soaked in the same testosterone-drenched utopianism that made the 1970s simultaneously revolutionary and revolting.

The book believes, with the cheerful totalitarianism of Nietzsche, that sex is the primary site of human liberation. This belief is as dated as motel bathroom wallpaper.

The novel's satirical targets are numerous but the central one is psychiatry itself. Rhinehart practices nondirective therapy, a method he describes with accurate and affectionate contempt as making the analyst resemble a redundant moron.

His colleague Ecstein publishes clear and brilliant books demonstrating that the key to therapeutic success is accident. Dr. Mann, the authoritative father figure, dispenses wisdom from an armchair while crumbling potato chips onto the table and charging by the hour.

The profession Rhinehart is abandoning was already built on chance pretending to be method, and the dice merely strip away the costume. When Rhinehart begins insulting his patients, assigning them exercises in humiliation and transgression, he is doing what his training already did, only faster and cheaper. The satire is accurate. The comedy is cruel. The two are indistinguishable.

The self is already a performance, already a set of habitual choices cpnstructing an identity. Rhinehart cites Jung, Nietzsche, Chuang-Tzu and van den Berg in his epigraphs, and his dice therapy is a comic operationalisation of ideas already circulating in the counterculture of 1968.

This period document sketches the ridiculousness of every liberation philosophy available to it, from Zen to radical therapy to free love, to drugs and alcoholism, to gambling and investing, with the affection of an author who has tried them all and found them wanting, and the mischief of a man who has tried them all and found them amusing.

The dice do not free Rhinehart into happiness or wisdom. They free him into chaos, legal jeopardy, the destruction of his marriage, and a grandiosity so total it becomes indistinguishable from psychosis.

The liberation the die promises is genuine. The liberated man is a fugitive composing his memoir in hiding. The book does not look away from this consequence, and this is where its profundity ambushes the reader who came only for the laughs.

The supporting characters are drawn with a comic brush. Ecstein, short and rotund and brilliant, researches the rape of his own wife as a case study and publishes the results. Lillian Rhinehart, described as a female Don Quixote after being tossed in a blanket, responds to her husband's abandonment by rolling a die, taking a lover, and enrolling in Columbia Law School, and she is the sanest person in the book. Arturo Toscanini Jones, committed to a psychiatric ward for throwing hand grenades at Young Conservatives, has a better grip on the terms of his situation than any of his doctors. Eric Cannon, the messianic teenager with long hair and rimless glasses, escapes through a Broadway theater.

These characters are grotesques, but grotesques with mortgages and families and genuine grievances, and that separates Cockcroft from the merely absurdist tradition he is raiding.

Despite the considerable handicap of its sexual politics, Rhinehart creates a theology, a sacred text called "The Book of the Die," a congregation of dicepeople, and a missionary impulse that spreads from Manhattan to Missouri. When a correspondent writes to ask how to raise her daughter in the faith. The dice become God in an arbitrary, indifferent, and surprisingly difficult to disobey form.

This religion works as well as the others. It provides community, meaning, and the consolation of surrendering personal responsibility to a higher power that cannot be blamed, reasoned with, or sued. That the higher power is a cube of painted plastic is a reductio ad absurdum of all religion, an honest account of how faith has always operated.

Plenty to think about and plenty to cringe over.

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Italy has a charming national hobby: rewriting its own résumé. Simon Levis Sullam's The Italian Executioners rips that résumé apart.

The year is 1943, Mussolini has fallen, and the newly reborn Republic of Salò, that grotesque puppet state dangling from a German fist, has made Jew-hatred its founding ideology. Article 7 of the Manifesto of Verona formally declares Jews foreigners and enemies.

Giovanni Preziosi, a defrocked priest who had already gifted Italy its first translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back in 1921, returns from Berlin having been personally received by Hitler, and takes charge of the General Inspectorate of Race. His twenty-one-person staff catalogs "racial status," spreads antisemitic propaganda in schools, oversees property confiscations, and publishes a journal devoted to the study of Jews as a civilizational threat. The country that today wrings its hands about Zionism was, at this moment, running a meticulously Italian genocide, and Sullam intends to introduce you to every smiling bureaucrat behind it.

Meet the cast of enthusiasts. Giovanni Martelloni, head of the Office of Jewish Affairs in Florence, moonlights as both a writer of scholarly-toned antisemitic newspaper articles and a hands-on confiscator who personally kicks in doors.

Giocondo Protti, a distinguished Venetian radiologist, takes to the lecture circuit describing Jews as "a spiritual monstrosity afflicting the soul of the world in the same way that cancer is a biological monstrosity," to public acclaim and possible Nazi funding.

In Venice on December 5, 1943, as young pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli enchants an audience at La Fenice, Italian police are compiling the final arrest lists for the following night's roundup of over 160 Jews, conducted street by street with the help of racial registers the state itself had built since 1938. Brescia's local newspaper greets the operation as cause for "great satisfaction."

A Resistance-adjacent network near the Swiss border turns out to be a criminal enterprise selling Jews to the Germans at 2,000 lire per head. The informers include business partners, students who denounce their own teachers, a sixteen-year-old who plants a Communist flyer in a Jewish professor's briefcase, and a stage designer named Bruno Pastacaldi who cheerfully passes the anonymous mail along each morning.

The postwar settlement is where the story achieves its particular flavor of comedy. Gaetano Azzariti, president of the tribunal that administered the racial laws from 1938 to 1943, goes on to become minister of justice, then a judge on Italy's Constitutional Court, then its president, a position he holds until his death in 1961.

Mario Cortellini, Venice's Deputy Commissioner for Jewish property seizures, is appointed postwar head of the Office for the Recovery of Jewish Property, making him the designated guardian of the treasure he personally looted.

Giovanni Martelloni's 1950 trial ends in acquittal for all sixty-eight defendants. The Resistance, lasting eighteen months and involving a minority of Italians, spawns dozens of commemorative centers; Fascism, a two-decade mass phenomenon, spawns very few.

Italy glides from the "era of the witness" straight to the "era of the savior," celebrating the courageous few who hid Jews, and conveniently bypassing the era in which tens of thousands of Italian police officers, clerks, journalists, doctors, and neighbors decided, often voluntarily and for a fee of up to 9,000 lire per head, to do exactly the opposite. A country now vocal about the “crimes” of Zionism has yet to officially acknowledge its own.

Simon Levis Sullam is a professor of contemporary history at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, a fitting perch for a scholar excavating the city where Italian police rounded up Jews in December 1943 while the opera house stayed open for business.

His book is a short, furious act of historical accounting, and its central message is as uncomfortable as a Fascist bust in a constitutional court hallway. Italy did this to its own Jews, Italy enjoyed doing it, and Italy then hired the people who did it to run the postwar republic.

A country whose officials today drape anti-Zionist rhetoric in the language of human rights, while their own Holocaust Remembrance Day legislation carefully avoids naming the Italian police forces responsible for the deportations, is a country still deep in the business of selective memory. The hypocrisy is architectural in its ambition: condemn Israel, skip the chapter on Preziosi.

The book is thin, the indictment is fat, and the gap between them is where Italy's moral reckoning went missing decades ago and apparently has no forwarding address.

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