Lázár

There is a particular pleasure in watching a young writer reach for the masters and very nearly get there. Lázár — Nelio Biedermann’s debut, written when he was barely into his twenties — opens with the birth of Lajos von Lázár in southern Hungary in 1900 and follows his family’s long fall through war, revolution and the slow dismantling of an old world.

The good

Bulloch’s translation is the first thing you notice: rhythmic, poetic, eminently readable. Biedermann has clearly read his Mann and his Proust — the passage of time, the way history swallows the private lives of its characters, the haunted manor at the edge of a sinister forest. When it works, it is genuinely transporting, with a magical-realist shimmer over the historical detail.

The reservation

The pace is relentless. Fifty-six years compressed into under three hundred pages means we rarely sit with anyone long enough to know them. What wants to be Brideshead sometimes lands closer to a beautifully shot costume drama — and a few of the sex scenes feel less essential than the jacket copy would have you believe.

Still: an astonishing thing for a writer this young to have made. I suspect more charitable readers than me will love it without reservation.