Péter Gárdos's Fever at Dawn is a novel based on the lives of his parents. It spans less than a year, beginning in July 1945. In that brief time, Gárdos evokes worlds of love and pain.
Miklós is a 25-year-old Hungarian Jew, an idealistic journalist and dreamy poet, just released from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of World War II. In the opening pages, he's aboard a ship that will take him and 223 other survivors to Stockholm, to convalesce. He requests from the Swedish Office of Refugees a list of women survivors who, like him, are being nursed in Sweden. He asks that they be from his region of Hungary and under 30. From his hospital bed in a "barracks-like wooden hut," he writes 117 identical letters to these women. He gets 18 replies, and gains several pen pals, but only Lili captures his heart.
Over the next several months, Miklós and Lili correspond, exchanging stories from their past lives and their respective hospital settings hundreds of kilometers apart. Gárdos draws this story in part from his parents' letters, which his mother presented to him after Miklós's death. Fever at Dawn, told in Gárdos's first-person voice, is a sweet love story framed by horror. Miklós is repeatedly reminded of his dwindling time, but, after all he's survived, he is determined to marry.
At once heartrending and lighthearted, this romance covers enormous ground in love and war, joy and tragedy, humor and pathos. Fever at Dawn, with its historical backdrop, will win over many readers. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia