Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

3 February 2026

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth and the European Union.

László Krasznahorkai (Author), Ottilie Mulzet (Translator)

Description

WINNER OF THE 2025 NOBEL PRIZE

Now in paperback, the capstone to Krasznahorkai’s four-part masterwork, and winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town?offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.

Reviews

"Krasznahorkai’s headlong comedy of obsession and wonderful squalor set in small-town Hungary. Majestic." — The New York Times Book Review

"László Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece." — The Millions

"Singular and uncompromising, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is a masterpiece by one of the great writers of our time." — National Book Award Judges' citation

"Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy in this sprawling, nonpareil novel, which harkens back to early works such as Satantango...his vortex of a novel compares neatly with Dostoevsky and shows Krasznahorkai at the absolute summit of his decades-long project. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands." — Publishers Weekly

"A literary heir to Kafka, Beckett, and Dostoyevsky: Krasznahorkai’s genius has been his ability to absorb the tectonic changes of politics and culture into his singular style. His challenge of despair is applicable under any economic system. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is his latest, longest, strangest, and possibly greatest novel?suffused with nihilism, but deeply funny." — The Baffler

"Krasznahorkai is a pungent delineator of character, and the landscape of his imaginary city is peopled with figures as busy and distinctive as those of a painting by Bruegel. While the novel energetically pursues Krasznahorkai’s habitual themes – disorder, spiritual drought, the impossibility of meaning in the absence of God – it does so in a tone that glitters with comic detail." — Jane Shilling, The New Statesman

Paperback

9780811239707

137 x 203 mm • 576 pages

£16.99

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Standalone Ebook

9780811226653

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