An Exclusive Love is the type of exquisite book one reads and finishes in the one sitting. It is the type of story that opens up discussions around dinner tables because of the affirmative portrayal of assisted suicide. However, this is not a book about death. Johanna Adorján has written here, in her first book, an ode to enduring love.

The story is about her healthy 71-year-old grandma and her dying 82-year-old grandfather. This dignified cultural Hungarian couple, who have lived through the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, decide to take their own lives, together. Later, Adorján pieces together the enigma of her grandparents’ last day, and by doing so unravels their untold experiences as Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust, and their arrival as migrants in 1956 Denmark.

Told with such respect for their decision and for the way they lived their lives, An Exclusive Love becomes both a celebration of Adorján’s grandparent’s full lives – but also, powerfully, a reflection of hers. This is an important story for us all because it allows us to reflex on our fragility and of those around us.