They Were Found Wanting & They Were Divided ─ They Were Found Wanting / They Were Divided

The celebrated TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY by Count Miklos Banffy is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in Hungary, Banffy’s novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical acclaim and appear here for the first time in hardcover.

They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, the second and third novels in the trilogy, continue the story of the two aristocratic cousins introduced in They Were Counted as they navigate a dissolute society teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Count Balint Abady, a liberal politician who defends his homeland’s downtrodden Romanian peasants, loses his beautiful lover, Adrienne, who is married to a sinister and dangerously insane man, while his cousin Laszlo loses himself in reckless and self-destructive addictions. Meanwhile, no one seems to notice the gathering clouds that are threatening the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that will soon lead to the brutal dismemberment of their country. Set amid magnificent scenery of wild forests, snowcapped mountains, and ancient castles, THE TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY combines a Proustian nostalgia for a lost world, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.

Count Miklos Banffy (1873-1950) was a Hungarian nobleman with extensive estates in Hungarian Transylvania (now Romania). He was the first patron of composer Bela Bartok and briefly Hungarian foreign minister after World War I. His castle and great library were deliberately destroyed by the retreating Nazis in 1944.