“The Dog adopted the Ancsas in the spring of ’48”: so the story begins. The Ancsas are a middle-aged couple living on the outskirts of Budapest in a ruinous Hungary that is just beginning to wake up from the nightmare of World War II. The new Communist government promises to set things straight, and Mr. Ancsa, an engineer, is as eager to get to work building the future as he is to forget the past. The last thing he has time for is a little mongrel bitch, pregnant with her first litter. But Niki knows better, and before long she is part of the Ancsa household. The Ancsas even take her along with them when Mr. Ancsa’s new job requires a move to an apartment in the city.

Then Mr. Ancsa is swept up in a political crackdown—disappearing without a trace. For five years he does not return, five years of absence, silence, fear, and the constant struggle to survive—five years during which Mrs. Ancsa and Niki have only each other.

The story of Niki, an ordinary dog, and the Ancsas, a no less ordinary couple, is an extraordinarily touching, utterly unsentimental, parable about caring, kindness, and the endurance of love.

"[A]n extraordinary novel...It is Niki’s sheer dogginess, so perfectly rendered throughout, that is at the heart of this novel’s greatness." --Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

“One of Hungary’s leading novelists...Mr. Dery brings a kind of cunning naivete that records (or imagines) with utmost seriousness all the tremors of Niki’s soul. He puts, as it were, the psychological realism of the contemporary novel at the disposal of a fox terrier.” –The New York Times

“Outstanding Hungarian novelist and imprisoned hero of the 1956 revolution.” –The Nation

“Tibor Dery satirized authority in 1956 with a compassionate story of Niki the dog (and underdog) who triumpts-and is then imprisoned.” –The Washington Post

“The greatest depicter of human beings of our time.” –Georg Lukacs

“Tibor Déry was a dissenter, a subversive revolutionary and, in his old age, a jailbird. He was also one of the greatest stylists in the history of Hungarian literature.” –Péter Nádas

“Niki is a masterpiece, like Of Mice and Men, of the presentation of ‘Man’s inhumanity to man.” –Richard Church

“One of the most prominent writers in Hungary.” –The New York Times

“In Niki there is nothing mawkish: one’s heart is truly touched. By centering his seemingly artless story on the figure of a dog–that humblest, most poignant, and tenacious symbol of devotion, of the need to be attached–Tibor Déry has done more than present a contemporary political and human tragedy; he has illumined what might be called canine situation under the aspect of eternity.” –Rosamond Lehmann

“The biggest international success of Déry’s own writing career was his novella, Niki: The Story of a Dog, which appeared in Hungary in 1956 and was soon translated into various languages. It is an apparently simple storyline embodying a sharp critique of hard line Stalinist dictatorship. Here, too, the values are clear, as are their anthiseses: trust versus suspicion, freewill versus coercion, logic versus paranoia, generosity versus pettiness, love versus fear. In the West, no doubt, Niki’s success was helped by the fact that its author was in prison, and was therefore available as Cold War material.” –George Szirtes, Love and Other Stories

“[Déry’s stories] remind me of stories by Toslstoy, Chekhov, Verga, Lawrence and Hemingway. Here is one of the outstanding wrters of the twentieth century.” –Ben Sonnenberg

“Tibor Déry has few equals among writers in Hungarian…[He] is one of the …masters of that great tradition of European realism that we associated with the name of Thomas Mann, and he deserves our close attention.” –Times Literary Supplement (London)

“The strains of making fiction under…pressure show everywhere in Niki: it’s a tiny story, but told, for all it’s simplicity, with a strange effect of density, as if it is compressed under a great weight.” –The Cambridge Quarterly

“…a tender allegory of the years of postwar repression in Hungary.” –The Observer (London)