Akos Doma - A vágyak útja

The story begins with a birthday celebration. We are at the beginning of the 1970s, and the "narrow air" of the seventies sits oppressively on the celebratory kinship. The main character family, Károly, Teréz and their two children, Bori and Misi, are cramped in a one-room apartment.
Teréz has no place to stay: she has no illusions about the Western, free world, but she can no longer bear the shackles of being a Hungarian - and the family sets out to follow her.
The dissidents of the 1970s cannot, of course, be drawn to the concept of "migrant", loaded with a thousand overtones, but the situation is still partly the same: where it has become impossible to live a life with dignity, one must flee. And on the arrival side, it is usually not the end of fairy tales, but only uncertainty, humiliation and vulnerability that awaits the refugees, while the bridges behind them have all already burned.
The little boy, the big girl, the mother and the father: all four of them see their adversary wanderer differently, some of their lives are shaken, all of them change forever.
Persecuted, refugee, dissident, migrant: names and circumstances may change from age to age, but the great human experience always remains the same.
As parents or children at that age, this could have been our story. Here and now it's just a fairy tale, receding history and an instructive narrative...

"Do you think you will find a better world there? Money decides everything there too, the same money as here, love and money are mutually exclusive. We have at least this much consolation that after the war, our souls were ripped out with pincers. In the West they gave it voluntarily, that's the difference..."

Akos Doma was born in Budapest in 1963, spent his childhood in Hungary, emigrated with his parents to England via Italy, and then settled in Germany.
Writer and translator Akos Doma translated the works of László F. Földényi, Béla Hamvas, Péter Nádas and Sándor Márai into German, among others. The Road of Desires - which is his third novel - was included in the list of books nominated for the German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis).