Tóth Gábor Ákos - Balatoni Menedék

Freshwater Mediterranean - From the Golden Age to the Iron Age

The setting of the novel is the Balaton highlands in the stormy years of the first half of the last century, but the inhabitants of the village manor house in the title slowly turn out to have fled here not only from the destruction of the world, but rather from their own past... We are writing 1942, in the 1970s. "fool baron" and a refugee Jewish girl on the verge of adulthood try to survive the horrors, the deprivation, the terror, the betrayal by showing a smile to the trials.

During epidemics, revolutions, and wars, townspeople flood the vacation spots. We have seen recently that everyone tried to stay as far away from the danger zone as possible.

And they try to live according to what the locals who live in the holiday homes suggest: "No matter what happens in the world, here on the shore of the lake life goes on happily, and it will be like this until the end of time... Who cares about Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini when the good wine, says the band, and the girls' skirts ripple like waves lapping at the sides of sailboats."

Destinies drawn at the same time, often with tearful humor, move in front of the reader - between the ever-changing "sets" of Balaton - starting from the golden age of the millennia, until the II. World War II until the Iron Age. The heroes we met in the author's previous novel Balatoni Futár do not lie here either - but the carpe diem feeling of life is no longer a gentleman's passion, but rather a survival strategy...