`Not only a great piece of literature but a visual feast as well.

Julian Evans, BBC  (Julian Evans, BBC)

Lawrence Norfolk, author of ‘In the Shape of a Boar’

 ‘Wonderful!'

Victor Pelevin, author of ‘Babylon’

‘Not only a great piece of literature but a visual feast as well.'

Julian Evans, BBC 

'In these bittersweet pages you will find the fall of the regimes, and the last twenty years of Eastern Europe.'

Enrico Remmert, Rolling Stone Magazine

'Péter Zilahy, wanderer, adventurer, initiator of a great many performances and provocations, much resembles Jean-Arthur Rimbaud during the Commune of Paris.'

Yuri Andrukhovych, author of ‘Twelve Rings’ and ‘The Secret’

This book is about the madness of everyday life under a dictatorship. It shifts in theme and time, testing the borderlines of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, history and autobiography – all in the unassuming guise of a child’s ABC. Filled with his own striking photographs, Péter Zilahy gives fascinating insight into whole other universe behind the Iron Curtain. The Last Window–Giraffe is one of the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read.

This book is about the madness of everyday life under a dictatorship. It shifts in theme and time, testing the borderlines of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, history and autobiography – all in the unassuming guise of a child’s ABC.

The Last Window–Giraffe is a playful and personal journey through the political unrest of the seventies and eighties. It was inspired by a Hungarian children’s dictionary, entitled Window–Giraffe, which explained the whole world in simple terms; a world where everything was in order and all problems were easily solved. Popular across Europe for the best part of a decade, The Last Window–Giraffe is a politically infused rendition of the original: quirky, astute and powerful. Péter Zilahy draws on his travels around the ‘soft dictatorships’ of Eastern Europe, offering his acerbic observations on the often bizarre spectacle. In one instance he describes the carnival-like protests against the Milosevic regime in Belgrade simply and humorously. This reflects, like the format of the book, the manner in which the regime treat their people like children.

Filled with his own striking photographs, Zilahy gives fascinating insight into a whole other universe behind the Iron Curtain. The Last Window–Giraffe is one of the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read.

Péter Zilahy was born in 1970 in Budapest, Hungary. He is a writer and performer with diverse interests. His books have been translated into 18 languages. In 2001 he was a lecturer at New York University. His dictionary-novel The Last Window–Giraffe won the Book of the Year Prize in Ukraine in 2003.

Tim Wilkinson worked as an academic editor in Hungary in the 1970s. Alongside a number of translations of historical works, he has translated three novels by Imre Kertész.