The Rebels

by SandorMarai (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2007

  $4.38

  It is May 1918, and a group of boys are poised on the brink of adulthood. With war sweeping Europe, theirs has become a ghost town: fathers, uncles and older brothers have been called to the front; the trains that arrive through snow-capped mountains bear the living with the dead. As the boys' graduation looms, so too does their fear of going to fight. Drawn together by the end of all that is familiar, yet repelled by what adulthood has come to represent, a small group of them invent a clandestine world. In their hideaway, with its codes, loves, jealousies, and own elaborate rules, these four test out their frustrations and their fears. Their games are darkly comic, wildly imaginative, increasingly subversive, and they attract the attention of a visitor to the town. By summer's end, their secret is in ruins. The Rebels is a story of complicity and betrayal, of youthful exuberance and dawning responsibility. Another rediscovered gem from the great Hungarian author of Embers, it is a haunting novel that traces the experience of friends who confuse growing up with dying and adulthood with war, and are jolted forever from the final, irretrievable summer of their adolescence. Elegiac, sombre, musical, and gripping, Embers is a brilliant disquisition on friendship - Observer .

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.40

  It is May 1918, war is sweeping Europe, and a group of boys await graduation in their near-deserted town. Drawn close by an unspoken fear of leaving home to fight, they retreat into a clandestine world of codes, hideaways and fierce invention -- until one day a stranger enters their lives and their secret is exposed. From the great Hungarian author of Embers, The Rebels is the story of a final, precious summer: a haunting novel of youthful exuberance burning in the face of irrevocable change. 'Great qualities of deep, cynical realism combined with a wild, sometimes surrealistic sense of beauty' Sunday Times 'Elegant, languid and almost subversive. To read it is an experience that leaves one fully alert' Irish Times 'Delicate brilliance ...perfect and unforgettable detail, like a landscape in the last moments before darkness falls' Literary Review