I first started reading about the Hungarian Uprising in 2013 and I very quickly decided that this was a great subject for a novel. The Cold War period, an oppressive Communist regime, Soviet tanks, a brutal Secret Police, and ordinary people rising up in their quest for freedom. What was not to like? (From a novelist’s perspective at least.)
So I did a tonne of reading and made pages and pages of reference notes. I had an idea for some characters, so I dived in and started writing. But there was a problem. By starting the novel in October 1956, I had my characters meekly queuing for bread one minute and then chucking Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks the next. It was all happening too quickly. Clearly, the story needed more context.
This was a difficult book to write. On numerous occasions I put it aside to work on other projects, even completing an entire young adult trilogy (Scarborough Fair) in the meantime.
But the Hungarian Uprising was too compelling for me to give up on it entirely. I kept returning to it, changing the characters, trying different story-lines, and doing a lot more reading.
In 2016 we travelled to Budapest for a friend’s wedding and took the opportunity to visit the House of Terror, former headquarters of the fascist Arrow Cross Party during World War Two and then taken over as the headquarters of the Communist Secret Police, the AVO, after the war. You can see the symbols of both organisations in the modern fascia that runs around the roof. It is now a museum and a memorial to those who died at the hands of both brutal regimes. The torture cells in the basement are truly bone-chilling.
Then in 2018 I travelled back from Romania by train, staying overnight in Budapest. With a morning to spare before my train was due to depart, I visited the Corvin Cinema which was used as a base during the 1956 Uprising by one of the main groups fighting the Russians. There are plaques and statues around the building commemorating those who fought.
I finally decided to give the story the context it needed by setting the first half of the book in 1952-1953. The story needed to start before the death of Stalin (March 1953) when the Hungarian regime was at its most brutal. That way readers would, I hope, have more understanding about why the Uprising came about.
I eventually managed to get to the end of the story and, many revisions later, publish it. It’s now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, and is available to borrow from Kindle Unlimited.