Esther’s Inheritance
By Sándor Márai, Translated by George Szirtes
Picador £14.99, 148 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

Sándor Márai was a celebrated 1930s Hungarian novelist who wrote about bourgeois manners. The Soviets suppressed his work and, in 1948, he was forced into exile. He remained in the US until his suicide in 1989.

Written in 1939, Esther’s Inheritance is a melodramatic tale of lost love narrated by a middle-aged woman. Esther lives a reclusive life with her maiden aunt until an old flame, Lajos, turns up and throws her into disarray.

A charming confidence trickster who spurned Esther and married her sister, Lajos blithely arrives for Sunday lunch with an entourage in tow. The confrontation between them provides the book’s dramatic climax, but Esther remains frustratingly passive. Her final act of sacrifice for him should madden even the most vaguely feminist reader.

The writing is taut and the atmosphere of suspense carefully constructed, but this story is very much of its time.