Anna discovers that her father kept secret his participation in brutal, shocking events, the repercussions of which cannot be forgotten. When 36-year-old Anna Bator, a New Yorkbased newscaster for UNS News, finds herself in Budapest's Fo Street maximum security prison, she not only seems to be reliving the imprisonment of her own parents 30 years beforelike them, she has left behind a small daughterbut she is attempting to piece together the disparate fragments of her past in order to discover some kind of meaningful identity. (Aug.For this first novel set in modern-day Hungary, Marton, a journalist and author of the biography Wallenberg, draws on her personal background as the daughter of Hungarian news correspondents who fled their Soviet-dominated native land for the West. Filled with details of a life richly lived, Marton’s memoir has a requisite, wooden feel, as if publicly making the necessary gestures without being emotionally present. His sudden death by a heart attack in 2010 struck a terrible blow, and Marton retreated again to Paris, where she and Holbrooke had purchased a pied-à-terre in the Latin Quarter in 2005 and where she now found solace.
Married in her native Budapest in 1995, the couple jet-setted all over the world, especially to war-torn sites, as Holbrooke brokered the peace in Bosnia and later was named special U.S.
ambassador to Germany, with Paris as the meeting place in their busy lives. Fleeing that marriage in 1993 after two children (Jennings is described as cold and manipulative), Marton found a warm, willing relationship with Holbrooke, then U.S.
A refugee from Hungary with her family in 1957, Paris was where Marton attended university during the tumultuous late 1960s as a foreign correspondent with ABC News in the 1970s, the city served as a base for her work, and was also where she and anchorman Peter Jennings conducted their love affair before marrying in 1979. Saturated with sadness, regret, and Hemingway, Marton’s (Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story) memoir of widowhood after the death of husband Richard Holbrooke recalls how Paris offered her the peace and salve she needed to assuage a broken heart.
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