Prague

I'm conflicted. On the one hand, the denseness of the prose made this book a slog to get through, but on the other hand, these are fascinating, flawed characters and the writing (especially the dialog) is clever as hell. The book was recommended to me by an acquaintance who heard I would be traveling to Budapest soon, and since he knew Budapest I figured it was a good recommendation. And it was. I started reading it and even took it with me to Hungary, thinking it would be cool to read it there, but I didn't get to it. So I read most of the book after I had done my exploring of the city and learned a lot about its history, which helped me understand some of the book better.

The book is about a bunch of American and Canadian expats in Budapest in 1990-91, shortly after the fall of Communism there. I definitely recognized the experience, having been an expat myself in Asia in the '80s and then in Central Asia in 1994-95. That aspect of the book struck me as very real.