Journey by Moonlight is a major classic of 1930s literature, penned by the talented Antal Szerb. This fantastically moving and darkly funny story tells of a bourgeois businessman, Mihály, torn between duty and desire.

'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...'

Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon with his wife, Erszi, he soon abandons her in order to find himself. Haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days—beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva—Mihály embarks on a journey from Venice to Ravenna, Florence, and Rome.

In this darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things. He knows he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.

Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned Len Rix, Journey by Moonlight is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, tracing the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.