An Exclusive Love

She is a healthy seventy-one-year-old woman. He is a dying eighty-two-year-old man. This couple, who have been united through the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, and through the joys of love and family, cannot live up to the vows they made nearly fifty years ago to stay together ‘until death do us part’: they will die as one, never to be parted. On 13 October 1991 they take their own lives, together.

Sixteen years later, their granddaughter Johanna Adorján digs through her family history to piece together the puzzle of the exotic and mysterious couple she knew only in fragments. She dares to give voice to her grandparents’ experiences as Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust, which her family has always labelled ‘something we don’t talk about’. She learns, too, how these experiences have shaped her family and the person she is today.

Not only a Holocaust memoir, An Exclusive Love is both a love story and a journey of self-understanding; beautifully told, vividly depicted and emotionally exquisite.