A Bed in Heaven
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Yesterday I buried my father. Now I’m in the Astoria Hotel at Kossuth Lajos utca number 19-21. I am lying in bed with his son’
How has Kata, a middle-aged married woman from Amsterdam, arrived at this extraordinary situation with Stefan? Like the layers of an onion skin, secret events of her family’s past are revealed, one by one: Kata’s student days in Holland and her first love, her father Jeno’s career as a cellist, his childhood in Budapest with Uncle Miksa, their peasant mother and prosperous middle-class father, then war, the terrible fate of Hungarian Jews, Jeno’s escape to Amsterdam, the Dutch woman – Stefan’s mother – who hid him there. And, at the very heart, a shameful, cruel enigma.
Just as war throws the entire lives of a generation into disarray, along with the lives of generations to follow, so do the painful effects of love reverberate from grandparents to parents to children, shaping and reshaping their lives as they attempt to lay their own interpretations on the past.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Ina
Rilke
Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.
Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.
Writers she has translated include Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, Hella Haasse, W. F. Hermans, Arthur Japin, Erwin Mortier, Multatuli, Cees Nooteboom, Connie Palmen, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. Rilke has won the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize. She has also been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Book Award.
Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.
Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.
Writers she has translated include Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, Hella Haasse, W. F. Hermans, Arthur Japin, Erwin Mortier, Multatuli, Cees Nooteboom, Connie Palmen, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. Rilke has won the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize. She has also been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Book Award.