Published: 2019
No of Pages: 340
RRP: 29.95
Dimensions: 153 x 234 mm
ISBN Print: 978-0-6482026-5-3
ISBN E-Pub: 978-0-6482027-0-7
ISBN PDF: 978-0-6482026-9-1
The Budapest Job
The Budapest Job by Alice Spigelman is a fast-paced thriller that builds to a dramatic revelation. A young architect arrives in Budapest in 1989 on a project, the year Communism is collapsing. He becomes embroiled in a secret police operation amidst the political turmoil of the times as he tries to track down the person who murdered his father in 1953 during the Stalinist years.
“ A thrilling and chilling book about how the past is never passed. Innocent eyes open at discovering betrayal and collaboration when a communist state collapses – a fine. novel that is all too true to life” Geoffrey Robertson QC (a human rights barrister, academic, author and broadcaster)
“Mysterious, thrilling and dramatic. The Budapest Job is an extraordinary book, a skilful and fast moving, sometimes frightening evocation of the agonies of Hungary under Stalinism and still today.” William Shawcross (author)
Reviews & Interviews
Click here to read the review in Country Style – February 2019
Click here to read the review in Gleebooks, The Gleaner – February 2019
Alice Spigelman was a recent guest of Woollahra Library. During her talk Alice discussed themes explored in her book including the rise and roots of ‘illiberal democracy’ and the new style semi-dictatorship admired by Trump and practiced in numerous post-communist countries in Europe. Click here to listen
About the Author
Alice Spigelman was born in Hungary and moved to Sydney as a child with her family in 1956. She has written plays about psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, Miles Franklin and about the burden carried by the children of Holocaust survivors titled A Kind of Reunion. Her biography Almost Full Circle on the international architect and proponent of modernism Harry Seidler was published by Brandl & Schlesinger. Her last book The Budapest Job explores what happens when atrocities are buried and perpetrators go unpunished, set in 1989 in post-communist Hungary and Sydney. She has reviewed books for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and given talks on subjects such as Catherine the Great, Harry Seidler and literary fiction and biography. She was a director of Australia for UNHCR and NIDA, Australia’s training institute for students in the performing arts, and was the Chair of Sculpture by the Sea, the international sculpture exhibition on the shores of Bondi and Cottesloe in Perth.
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