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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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Adele Bertei boards a Greyhound from Cleveland in July 1977 carrying a burlap-wrapped Fender Duo-Sonic, two thrift-store suits, a hundred dollars, and a shorn head. The ideal punk curriculum vitae for the world's most aggressive job application.

Her first stop in New York City is St. Patrick's Cathedral, where she lights candles for her two great teachers: Peter Laughner, the doomed Cleveland rock polymath who handed her the guitar, and Nan Goldin, the photographer who seduced her, shot her, and expanded her entire vocabulary of desire. Below St. Michael's foot, Lucifer winks.

The city outside is a borough of amphetamine junkies and broken umbrellas rushing into drains. Bertei, twenty-two years old, a self-taught butch who spent her adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory called Blossom Hill and her early adulthood drinking in gay bars with drag queens, is about to devour it. She is carrying, she tells us, centuries of bottled-up female rage and the genetic memory of Irish women with absent fathers and Italian men who lost fingers to the mob's cookie jar.

Downtown, Bertei enters the orbit of the Contortions, the all-aggression, all-function James Brown tribute band from hell fronted by James Chance, a man whose principal compositional tool is slapping audience members. The scene around them is a magnificent disaster of talent: Anya Phillips, the dominatrix-manager whose sex work funds the avant-garde; Lydia Lunch, teenage fury in a schoolgirl dress; Kathy Acker, ransacking the canon for sexed-up sacrilege; Nan Goldin photographing everyone into mythology; and Diego Cortez, the social fulcrum who connects everyone to everything including, eventually, Brian Eno.

Eno produces the No New York compilation after witnessing a Contortions set so violent that Village Voice critic Robert Christgau is forced to physically sit on James Chance to stop the carnage. Bowie, watching from nearby, later appears on the cover of Lodger dressed in a rumpled suit with limbs askew, which may be an homage or a hostage photograph.

After the Contortions Bertei forms the Bloods, an all-lesbian band that plays the First International Women's Rock Festival in Berlin, spray-paints THE BLOODS RULE on the Berlin Wall, nearly dies from Dutch heroin of lethal purity, and eventually plays an opening set for Van Morrison in a different key from each other.

Amsterdam provides a lesbian commune, a poker table with switchblades on it, and a houseboat on the Prinsengracht directly across the canal from Anne Frank's hiding place, where Bertei reads Hannah Arendt and Benjamin and begins to ask whether she has been reckless.

The Bloods dissolve, their twenty-year-old roadie Bobby Battery dies of an overdose, and Bertei wraps a tourniquet around her heart. What comes after, in the corporate music world, is a different and considerably more expensive kind of violence.

Adele Bertei grew up without a floor beneath her. A mother lost to schizophrenia, a stepfather who lost his decency to cruelty, and an adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory where she learned to be a butch daddy before she learned to play guitar. She survived all of it, moved to New York, made serious noise, and then wrote the book to prove it happened.

The women of No Wave were the scene, and every prior chronicle had treated them as decoration on someone else's monument. Bertei makes the case with her body, her diary, and her considerable fury that women like Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, and Pat Place were generating the voltage while the men were getting the album credits.

Every creative industry still operates a quiet system of attribution drift, where women's contributions age into the margins while men's become mythology. Bertei's corrective arrives late and she is aware of it. This gives the book the charge, the irritation of the betrayed who watched history get written wrong and waited long enough to be absolutely certain of the facts.

The memoir is exhilarating and self-serving in equal measure, but that is what a good memoir ought to be.

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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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