THE PAPER BRIDGE
A Return To Budapest
Monica Porter

First published in 1981 to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, The Paper Bridge was hailed as a vivid and insightful account of a very personal journey back to the author’s homeland. Noel Barber, the legendary journalist with a particular knowledge of Hungary, described it as ‘a moving personal document from a sensitive writer of great promise.’

Monica Porter was a small child when her family fled across the border to Austria and on to the United States. Now a Londoner, a journalist and a young mother herself, she wanted to rediscover the land of her birth and see whether there could be a real understanding between someone who had grown up in the West and those compatriots who had remained behind in an oppressive communist country.

Her journey brings her into contact with a vast assortment of colourful, often eccentric individuals, and with her keen eye for human behaviour and her astute observations, she paints an intriguing picture of an Eastern European state as it lurches into the final decade of the Cold War.

This revised edition includes not only a new Preface from the author, but also a Foreword specially written by Sir Bryan Cartledge, one of this country’s most distinguished diplomats, who was British Ambassador to Hungary in the early 1980s and is the author of what many consider to be the best history of that fascinating nation.

Monica Porter was born in Budapest in 1952 but left Hungary when she was four years old, in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution, and grew up in New York. She has been based in London since 1970 and is a freelance journalist.

http://www.monicaporter.co.uk