Connie Hampton Connally gave the first lecture in the Cleveland Hungarian Museum’s fall series on Saturday, the 14th. She is well-known to our Cleveland community. She introduced her first novel, The Songs We Hide several years ago. It is set in one of the darkest periods of Hungarian history, in the early 1950s, where two people connect and find meaning and hope in music. At Saturday’s session, Connie introduced her second novel, Fire Music. This latest novel is set in Hungary during the siege of Budapest. She cited Krisztián Ungváry’s The Seige of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II in providing her with the history of one of the fiercest battles of World War II and the background for her latest novel. The cost was extreme: 80,000 Soviet troops, 38,000 German and Hungarian soldiers, and 38,000 Hungarian civilians perished. She showed pictures of the bombed iconic chain bridge and described the devastation and suffering endured by the people who lived through it as she read excerpts from her novel. It is set in the modern day with reflections of a 78-year-old violinist, Antal Varga. The novel is about war, love, pain, and ultimately redemption; music is the pathway and the key. It is available on Amazon and is a novel well worth reading.
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