A novel about youth standing in the crossroads of consumerism, anxiety and (non)conformity. Augusta, a young graduate and entrepreneur, finally breaks through. ​She launches her startup in  circular design and fashion. On her way to find her true path, she explores cities, music cultures, the art scene and love.
Published by Kalligram, 2021
English version is on its way....

plot

Wall to wall is a novel about the experience of Budapesting – living, exploring, fighting, and moving on with all what the city means to the characters. The plot is centered around young startuppers, musicians, performing artists, copywriters and  influencers following their bumpy path just to question the state of living of not having questions. The scenes move from Budapest to the art scene of Berlin to end up in vibrant London.
Art galleries, ruin pubs, squats and fablabs, 3D-printed shoes, dance performances, venues and a lot of music: from ska to postpunk, from glitch-hop to K-pop from the nineties to today. Flashbacks take us to the nineties – the era when the parents of the characters were young – pubs, car radios and popstars.
The main characters are  running head to the wall, bouncing back, to find their way out by turning their back to it. There is no such thing as breaking the wall, as there is always a next wall to break, neither  turning your back to the wall makes you escape, as at the end of the other direction again, one may bump into a seemingly unsummortable  wall.
Do walls makes us fight, or our struggles are in vein?  Do we have the chance to take what we have learned from these struggles with us and move on without devastation?

14th October 2021 – book launch at Margo Literary Festival 

 published by Kalligram.  Supported by  INDIEGOGO ​

Pitch

Augusta is an art student experimenting with sustainable fashion. As a micro-influencer, she gets bored with selling nonsense products. She launches her blog shoes&architecture, and her sustainable 3D-printed shoes. Her work is showcased in Paris, and her startup is awarded in London. There are touching moments of love, disillusion, sexism, subtle and explicit violence. The vibrant scenes are ruin pubs, galleries, squats and overtourism in Budapest, Berlin with its fun and shady sides.

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​This book is standing in the crossroads of the past and the future, referencing the previous generation (the parents of the characters), what is being inherited from their culture, with a vision on what the future might look, and how it can be shaped by youth to be a healthy, sustainable, and respectful environment for their lives to live. The book is ready, it has been proofread in its Hungarian version, and short excerpts of the book are being published in literary journals.
The aim of the crowdfunding is to make it possible to create the English version. There is a crowd of readers out there, who would be interested, as the experience is universal on one hand, and the layers of the book: the Central European capital of partying Budapest (showing the traits of Barcelona in terms of diversity, overtourism and erasmusing), the Eastern European youth moving toward the West, especially the UK for jobs and studies, the experience of movement in space and time to get better opportunities for living out the dream: a startup in 3D printing shoes, that goes from the fablab entrepreneurialism to the corporate business: are all exciting and especially extremely relevant experiences. The book reflects in the end on the new "walls" created by the lockdown due to the pandemic. My insights both from experience as a sociologist, and as wanderer in space and fields of art make the book authentic. The sensitive description of the relationships of the siblings, friendship, love and affection, as well as disillusions, sadness and failures are all very humane and at times lyric. The scenes of parties, ruin pubs, exhibition openings, art galleries are all vibrant and bring together 'real' typical characters of the scene, with descriptions of the experience of music and dance. Music plays a vital role in the book, both in describing characters, times and formulating messages. Music covers the classics of ska, post-punk, and local underground as a throwback in time and modeling how the 'past' is being present, as well as references on K-pop, glitch hop or electro, and jazz are the contemporary experiences of the characters on their path  to be really-grown-ups.

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Excerpt from the book

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I stepped into  coffee beans in the dark, one piercing my sole at a particularly sensitive point, maybe it was the point for my kidneys or the liver, it was way too sensitive, I thought. My brother didn’t like it when he had to make coffee in the morning. There was always something going on, scattering the coffee beans or, at best, smashing the cup, smearing the counter, the coffee pouring under the pots, the cups, and then drying out on the counter leaving a spot. Rather, he waited for me to get up earlier so he didn’t have to bother with the whole thing. Up until then, only three times had I spent the night in a different apartment. I loved waking up in my own bed, so I always went home at night. That day, or the day before, I don’t know what the exact wording is, I was stumbling in the darkness of dawn, dimly shedding light with my phone on my way in the apartment so my brother wouldn’t wake up. He was making coffee in the evening, that is why there were beans all around the floor and it made me believe that I would most likely find a chap on the living room couch, so I tip-toed carefully not to wake up Sanya who did actually stay with us for overnight. I felt a slippery surface that immediately cracked under my foot,  I instinctively jumped aside, and grabbed hold of the small table, upsetting the lined beer cans. The cover of the Joy Division record laying on the floor was cut in a long stripe by the crease, the remaining beer poured on it and started to foam lightly on the surface of the cover smearing it. I quickly soaked up the beer along the drawn lines that crossed the cover, culminating in a kind of mountain in the middle. My brother will be overwhelmed, Unknown Pleasures is a real rarity, the illustration on the cover has wandered every segment of pop culture, from tattoos to comics, to finally being printed on t-shirts hanging in the closet of the shopper generation. Sanya had no idea that the image on the cover was an electromagnetic beam emanating from stars taken with a radio telescope, in which each line was an independent pulse imprint. The light beam is composed of independent and unique pulses that refract due to the interference that gets in their way and form mountain peaks and creases. My brother was indescribably happy when he returned home with the record the day before, so I wanted to make no damage. I pushed the wiped cover closer to Sanya to distract the suspicion from me, after all, it was not me to leave the beers on the cigarette-scattered table and toss the cover on the floor. We were looking forward to a fight, as my brother broke a whole sequence of rules of our agreement, and among them one of the  most important ones: no cigarettes and no drinks in the living room. When we moved in, our parents made us to write down a policy that we discussed together point by point, and that would be hung on the wall of the hall. My brother and I vowed then that he avoids my girlfriends by far, otherwise he could not live with me under one roof. Since I still paid most of the bills, he did so and sticked to our agreement. Out of sheer weakness, I made amendments in the case of at home parties. The notion of Friday and Saturday had long since lost their significance in the case of my brother, these days colluded with Thursday, and would sweep through Monday and Wednesday if I had not stopped him, but overlooked him hanging out with his buddies in our home once or twice a week. (...)

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