Northwestern University Press chose this novel as one of the books to launch the new design for their Unbound Europe series. Set in Communist Hungary of the late sixties, Ferenc Barnás's (b. 1959) novel follows the ninth child out of eleven in a poor family living in a village north of Budapest. The family is led by a strict, uncompromising patriarch, a former pre-communist army officer and rail worker who struggles to make ends meet with a cottage industry manufacturing rosaries and devotional objects, while attempting to avoid unwanted attention of the government. Barnás, as skillfully translated by Paul Olchváry, achieves a rare feat by telling the story in the voice of the young boy. Told through dialogue, memory, and dreams, the Faulknerian narrative challenges the reader to piece together the trauma and guilt that the boy experiences after suffering bullying and abuse at the hands of his schoolmates. The novel is the author’s third – after The Parasite (1997) and Bagatelle (2000), and was originally published as A kilencedik in 2006. Ferenc Barnás and the translator of the novel, Paul Olchváry – who is also the translator of György Dragomán’s The White King and Károly Pap's Azarel – will be holding a series of book launches and readings in the US and Canada. (For details, check the publisher's website.) "The Ninth is a masterpiece. It represents a seamless meeting of language and subject, yielding a quietly radiant text. . . . [It] is an elegant book and a ruthless one. It is a courageous book, one that knows fear. As always the case with good literature, it is about us, wherever we may live in the world.”
—Péter Esterházy, author of Celestial Harmonies “Even privation can be picturesque, and Ferenc Barnás has both the eyes and the heart to prove this true. Thanks to his talent, the reader sees the world through the eyes of a poor nine-year-old boy, and he doesn’t fare badly at all with this transformation.” —George Konrád, author of The Case Worker “[Barnás] is a singular, original voice in contemporary Hungarian fiction. [He] gives voice to the forgotten, the quirky, the indigent, the miserable.” —Ivan Sanders, Columbia University | 
