Peter Nadas (b. 1942) is a Hungarian novelist who gained worldwide fame primarily for his grandiose novels The Book of Memories (1986, Russian translation 2014) and Parallel Stories (2005). This edition serves as a kind of introduction to the work of this classic of modern literature, which has not yet been well read in Russia. The book covers more than half a century of his work and includes seven important things, starting with the debut novel "The Bible", in which the twenty-year-old author began to realize his youthful plan "to describe everything-everything that people hide from each other", and ending with "The Salt of Life" - an ironic travelogue in which Nadash, unexpectedly changing the scale, analyzes not the micro-movements of thoughts and feelings of contemporaries, but the mechanism of historical changes on the example of a small European town. In the center of the book is a striking text: a philosophical novel-essay "Own Death" about the clinical death experienced by the author in 1993. Translations that were previously printed are published in a new edition.