Jose Costa has just attended the Anonymous Writers Congress in Istanbul and is on his way back to Rio when a bomb scare on his flight forces him to spend a night in Budapest. Fascinated by the Hungarian language - he is after all a ghost writer by trade and a man who lives by language - he spends the night watching television, trying to pick out words in this tongue, 'the only one the devil respects'. In charting Jose's life we enter a storytelling labyrinth, as his myth-making, love-making and essays into another culture become mired in the world where celebrities make reputations and fortunes from the writing of others, and where the reader is not sure what language, or what reality, is being offered ... Budapest is Buarque's most naturalistic fiction to date, and the funniest' Times Literary Supplement 'Perhaps the most beautiful of Chico's three mature books, Budapest is a labyrinth of mirrors whose resolution comes, not in the plot, but in the words, like in poems' Caetano Veloso 'In moving the narrator between Rio and Budapest, Buarque builds a brilliantly symmetrical design, incorporating two cities, two languages, two love affairs, and two halves of his hero's life as a ghost writer. Buarque's writing here has the alluring, poetic quality of a dream described aloud' Independent 'It is the risks he takes that give brilliancy to his tale. He tunnels deep into the human mind and emerges with more questions than answers ... It is a privilege to be able to share in that progress' Glasgow Herald