Sándor Márai’s third novel to appear in English is a tale of four young men, neither quite boys nor yet adults, fearful of what is to come, clinging to the last vestiges of childhood. Written well before Embers and Casanova in Bolzano, The Rebels explores, as they did, the ways in which people imagine their futures in the light of their own perceptions of the past. It is a novel about friendship and about memory, what is remembered and how memory focuses on seemingly irrelevant things. All three novels contain images of candles, flickering and slowly going out.

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