For those who understand Hungarian, I don’t recommend reading this. The surprise may be ruined. I recommend the download page instead, with shorter descriptions.
Azoknak, akik tudnak magyarul, nem javaslom ennek az olvasását. Elrontja a meglepetést. Ehelyett a letöltőoldalt ajánlom, rövidebb leírásokkal.
All proper names and other word inventions of mine are kept in the original spelling, including the names of languages, which are spelt lowercase, according to the Hungarian rules.
Published as a single volume titled Angari – Mira.
12 thousand words, 2017
Volcanologist Michel Leroy is invited to the tiny tropical volcanic island of Angari to check whether they should expect an eruption or not. It turns out that beyond the island and the volcano though, there is another Angari, a nine year old girl who is absolutely sure the volcano will erupt and the island will be completely destroyed. A routine check is enough for Michel to know that if Angari is really going to erupt it will indeed destroy the island, but how does Angari know that at nine years old and with no knowledge of geology? She cannot even read.
He begins to examine the volcano which is gradually awakening, and soon it becomes clear that the eruption will take place. Shortly after the last person (Angari) leaves the island, it is destroyed in one of the most powerful volcanic explosions in history.
(The location of Angari is never disclosed. Practically all countries that have tropical volcanic islands are mentioned as “abroad”. Both the unnamed country Angari is located in and the dialect spoken by the islanders, of which we learn many words, are created by myself. The language was later reused as the szúni language in Ninda.)
23 thousand words, 2018
The sequel to Angari is set three years later, when Angari, now named Angari Lerua having been adopted by volcanologist Michel Leroy, and now also 12 year old volcanologist-to-be at ALERT (American Lithosphere Exploration and Research Taskforce) and popular personality known worldwide, is on her summer vacation, but after receiving a sign, she cuts it short and travels to the little town of Naknir, on a high plateau of the volcano Halli-Haumma, part of the Múnaóli mountains. The residents of Naknir, of course, all know who Angari is, including a local girl, Mira, who speaks none of the languages Angari has now learned, but they understand each other without words. Together, without letting the adults know how they communicate with each other and how they understand what happens inside the mountains, they discover the secret of the enormous volcanic movement beginning underground, foretelling some smaller catastrophes.
(Again, the location and the language is completely made up by myself.)
(Gabi and the Elf), 7 thousand words, 2017
Two weeks before Christmas, Gabi is home alone watching the snow storm outside when she hears a frightening crash from the attic. On going up, she discovers a boy in a fancy dress who calls himself Félix and claims he has fallen from Santa Claus’s sleigh while performing a routine check. He is an elf from the North Pole. Gabi is now seven and a half years old (and she has been good), but doesn’t believe in Santa Claus and his elves. Félix has only a small amount of magic powder, but he can fix the elf-shaped hole on the roof with it, and he can turn a Lego fireplace into a real one to throw a letter written by Gabi into to ask for help from the North Pole.
But the elves don’t come. Félix, who can pull chocolate out of places where there wasn’t any and who can create Christmas trees and ornaments out of nowhere, loses his patience and looks for a vehicle to travel to the North Pole. He finds a space rocket in a book, but since he has never tried this magic before, he needs to do an experiment to make sure it will work. Gabi colors a Hello Kitty drawing in a coloring book, and Félix turns it into a real kitten, who is eating szaloncukor (the special Hungarian Christmas candies) and says both meow and bow-wow because the last thing Gabi drew with those pens was a puppy.
Satisfied that the magic worked, they take the book outside and get into the rocket, then set off for the North Pole.
20 thousand words, 2017
12 year old Gabrielle lives in a small Swiss town with her mother. Her parents divorced a year ago when they became hostile to their old friend Amadeus and forbade Gabrielle from contact with him.
One day she meets a handsome young man, Anders, 25, who, after being friends with her for a while, confesses to being in love with her. The first kiss is not the only one. Some weeks later Gabrielle wakes up at early dawn, feeling nauseous.
Everything has changed. She won’t tell Anders; she won’t tell her mom. She leaves the house and rings at Amadeus’ door.
Gabrielle disappears for days. The police question Amadeus, but he refuses to let them in without a warrant, so they have to leave.
Nothing has been heard of Anders since Amadeus visited him that morning and gave him thirty minutes to disappear from the canton, or rather from the country.
Gabrielle’s parents are invited to a cafe where they are informed about her broken-off relationship and abortion, and they’re given a list of demands they must meet before Gabrielle will come home.
30 thousand words, 2016
Eliška and Jana, two 14 year old actresses in Prague, 1984, are working on their first roles. It’s a television series where Eliška plays Hanka, a girl who helps everyone while Jana plays her best friend Anežka. Becoming friends in real life too, they gradually determine that Hanka has fallen in love to Anežka, but that’s not written in the script. This accounts for Eliška’s actions, because without letting the crew know, they start adding this interpretation into the roles.
Jana knows Eliška has a secret, but she only learns the details when they’re shooting at another location. Eliška takes her to a house where there is a little girl and a mournful elderly couple. Eliška introduces the girl as her sister and explains that the grandparents have no more children and that if they die, Jitka will go to an orphanage.
On returning to the film crew, Eliška announces that she’s changing her surname. When asked why, she says this is her father’s name. Who is your father? My father is a murderer, she says.
She explains to Jana that it was an accident, but he is imprisoned for five years.
Hanka’s father in the series is played by a famous actor, and they get into the habit of calling each other “father” and “daughter” even when the camera is not running. On the last day he is working on the series, he tells Eliška he’d be happy if she’d call him “father” even when not filming together. She realizes now she has got a father – or rather two, because the director of the series, who has to be a bit of a father to all of them, pays a special attention to her, always paying attention to how she feels. A moment later, she receives a note from her grandparents asking for a callback, and then Pavel, Anežka’s love interest in the series, confesses his real life love to her. But she gets her first kiss from another.
Published as a single volume titled Jane Carson kalandjai (Jane Carson’s Adventures).
44 thousand words, 2001
Jane Carson, 14 year old daughter of Colonel Richard Carson, captain of the interstellar passenger ship Urania, leaves her home on planet Alexa to spend the summer vacation with her father. Boarding the starship on Callindra, she gets acquainted with the officers, including first navigator Major Law, an elderly gentleman; first pilot Major Wright, another elderly man whose harsh style is not to her liking; young and handsome second navigator First Lieutenant Charles; and others – and the crew, especially Cadet Platoon Four, twelve young men charmed by and making friends with her, appoint her Chief Cadet, an obsolete rank, so she is the only one in the Galaxy.
Jane, a star ship maniac with some theoretical knowledge about Urania, easily adapts to their military style and spends all her time with the platoon when they’re working on maintenance, or in the control room during takeoff and hyperspace jumps. She has no interest in the two thousand passengers on board.
After several hyperjumps, they are alerted to a suspicious problem in one of the numerous pieces of machinery in the engine house. Most of the officers and a platoon of cadets go there to check the error. While they are away, an emergency alarm is triggered. There is fire on board.
Following the cameras of the fire robots on screen from the controller, Jane notices something, orders Platoon Four to the control room, and orders the arrest of the rest of the officers, including Wright and Charles. Then she shows her father what she has found: the remains of a detonator.
The detonation destroys all the equipment that controls the internal airlocks, trapping most of the officers and a platoon in the engine house. They can’t come back and fly the ship which is now in the deep space of an uninhabited solar system.
Jane organizes the work, commanding the first three sectors. They work on setting the trapped people free. But after days of hard work, a cadet is injured in an accident. Jane decides to take the ship to a port immediately, no matter there is no hyperspace navigator she can trust, but she orders the arrested officers to the control room and takes the duty of the hyperspace navigation herself.
This lets her discover who caused the detonation and why, before guiding Urania safely to a planet.
60 thousand words, 2006
A year later, on her next vacation on Urania, Jane is in the control room again when the unimaginable happens: the first case in history when two ships collide in the open deep space. The other one is Hyperion, a military prison ship. Both being damaged, neither one can leave the location. However, an unpleasant thought occurs to them: what if the collision caused such severe damage in the security system that the imprisoned might be set free and take over the ship? What if the crew they know are actually prisoners?
Her fears proving to be well founded, Jane takes the duty of leading armed forces and conquering the other ship, to be able to send a little space boat for help. When the help arrives, Urania makes a crash landing on the planet Fomina.
34 thousand words, 2012
While Urania is being repaired, Jane is invited to the neighbouring planet Auwelia with her platoon, to help two hundred tourists trapped underground. Knowing nothing about the planet, they’re stunned at the sight of a grey desert with lava flows in different colors – red, orange, yellow, blue, purple – and arriving at Complex Six, they find themselves in a labyrinth of underground corridors, carved by lava in the glass-hard rock, with gemstones embedded in the walls. Jane immediately hates Auwelia, a heaven only for geologists, and wants to go home; but only when she can do so together with those waiting for rescue in an underground shelter, separated from the outside world by a lava eruption.
Jane, the platoon and the local team try everything to prevail over Auwelia, but the extremely active planet continually hinders their efforts. Finally, Jane decides there is only one solution. The lava cannot flow upwards, so they must break a hole on the bottom of the complex: they need a nuclear bomb.
18 thousand words, 2014
After Urania loses half of its nuclear pile in the collision with Hyperion, they had to build a replacement one, and it’s now travelling to Urania on two tracked transport convoys, the Saurus. Two million tonnes each. They’re going through a grass covered plain on Fomina, when Melissa, a small Terraluna ship crashes into a hill after the pilot has a brain haemorrhage. He is rescued, but the wreck is blocking the way for Saurus. And the small ship weighs 22 thousand tonnes.
While the repairs are being carried out, they realize the danger is greater than delaying the departure of Urania. The damage inside Melissa has affected the nuclear systems, and they can calculate how much time do they have before the Fominan life is going to become endangered. They must remove the ship from that world, immediately, regardless of its inability to move.
Still in progress. Published 28 parts, the whole work is planned to be about 30 parts. Counting nearly 1 million words as of January 2022. Coauthored by Láng Krisztina, my late first wife.
Click on Introduction here.
15 thousand words, 2020
Hungarian journalist Halász György (in Latvian, Jurģis) meets local girl Lauma on the seashore in Latvia. The girl, who he reckons may be 12, finds him very handsome, but their friendship only actually starts when she discovers he is listening to songs by famous singer Lauris Reiniks, a favorite of Latvian girls. She wants to participate in a song contest and sing a song by Lauris. Jurģis helps her to choose the song and goes with her to the contest, meeting Mancs (Paw), Lauma’s dog who isn’t a dog but a girl, younger than Lauma but old enough to notice her crush on the man. Lauma says he is a very honest person: he even doesn’t agree to meet anywhere but on the street, to avoid any suspicion about what happens between them. And he has a love, Napocska (Sunny) with whom he was together many years ago, although they broke up, he went back to Hungary and they lost contact.
Lauma asks Jurģis to help her practicing the next song, but this takes more time together, so they arrange a meeting with Lauma’s mother, Ausma. Mancs guides him to their place. When seeing each other, he learns Lauma is a year younger than he thought.
(Bear Cubs), 13 thousand words, 2013
My remake of Erich Kästner’s Das doppelte Lottchen features 12 year old Laimi and Saimi Karhunen, living in separate Finnish towns and suddenly running across each other in the railway station in Helsinki. But they cannot do what the twins did in Kästner’s book, learning all about each other’s life in the summer camp so that they can switch places, because there’s no time for that. And they cannot make their parents fall in love again. Both are living with a new spouse and there’s a little sibling in both families. The twins decide to disappear in Helsinki, to a friend’s weekend house.
The plan they devise is based on their overwhelming desire to live together now. Together with each other, with the little siblings, with the parent they knew so far, with the parent they didn’t knew till now, and with the stepparents. All eight of them must form a single family, in a common house which they must buy.
Karhu means bear, and they decide they’re bear cubs, and everyone must fear the bear’s anger.
(Míla and Vili), 9 thousand words, 2018
11 year old Míla has a happy life on a farm on Southwestern Iceland with her best friend, a horse called Vili. However, she learns about her parents’ plan to sell the farm and Vili, and to move to Reykjavík. Frightened and upset, she gets on Vili and departs for the highlands, the vast lifeless volcanic desert of Central Iceland.
Police helicopters search for them, but to no avail. They reach the other edge of the desert after a whole night of horseriding.
Beyond 500 thousand words in January 2022, work in progress; its final size is planned to be over 750 thousand words if I write it in three parts, or over 1 million words if in four. Ninda didn’t decide yet.
Please note there are aspects and plot lines kept completely in secret yet, therefore not mentioned here.
Part One
The story of Ninda, the greatest personality who ever lived in the history of the Galaxy, begins on a dull, dim dawn when a group of homeless urban thieves of Lũakẽàń, Sỳÿndoṙeìa decides to sneak into the suár and steal. But the RV arrests most of them; only one reaches there, the Süsü (Silly), a five-and-seven year old girl (by the Sỳÿndoṙeìan calendar, of course, the seven being months). But the suár (similar to a hypermarket) is part of the Aulang Laip, a ship of the Szúnahaum Brotherhood who refuse to extradite her. Receiving citizenship, she gets a new name in the szúni language: Hangikun Szesszinan Nindarangi Szilun Rienszá (Ninda for short), and now measured as 118 years old (by the szúni calendar, of course), she begins living on Aulang Laip, one of the many huge commercial star ships of the Brotherhood, the only nation in the Galaxy which has no home planet, and so they all live on ships.
Having learned the language by hypnopaedia and attending school, she soon learns this isn’t true: they not only have a home planet, but a whole galactic cloud which includes Szúnahaum, the weirdest habitable planet in the Galaxy. But all of this is kept top secret.
The ship, home to about 20 thousand people and able to carry as many passengers again, is wandering around in the Galaxy, landing on planets and selling goods and services. Ninda explores these places and gets acquainted with people from many backgrounds, establishing friendships. She’s got a unique, wise philosophical view and a calm, placid temper admired by those who meet her.
Meanwhile, the repressive dictatorship of Sỳÿndoṙeìa is getting more and more annoyed at her existence. Diplomacy charge d’affaires Åmmaĩt ÎÌdaṙa, a high-ranked official in the department of external affairs, does his best to revoke the interstellar warrant of arrest automatically issued against Ninda when she left Sỳÿndoṙeìa as a wanted criminal, because if anyone tries to arrest her anywhere in the Galaxy, Sỳÿndoṙeìa would face frightening consequences. The Brotherhood is a peaceful nation but extremely arrogant when protecting its citizens. He even travels to Aulang Laip, requesting permission to speak to Ninda, and they then become friends.
After this meeting, due to a totally unimportant coincidence, Ninda finds herself a target of an interstellar political conflict she absolutely doesn’t care about. Soon she is interviewed by a reporter, and she provides a full account of Sỳÿndoṙeìa and her life there. When the interview is aired by a Sỳÿndoṙeìan opposition TV channel, the poor and repressed people begin to admire and love her, the first person who dared to speak, and thus the Ninda cult starts to spread on the worlds of Sỳÿndoṙeìa and abroad. The emerging movement, calling itself ÀLAN (an abbreviation in sỳÿndoṙ language meaning “Ninda is the real leader of the association”) chooses the way of peaceful protest, following the approach they’ve learned from Ninda.
Ninda sometimes talks with them via hyperphone, aired live in all the country, but generally, she doesn’t care. With her best friend Szinensi, they’re learning fhangí, a galactically renowned thought organizing system which operates with interconnecting written symbols. She also plays fengrá, a game with complex rules where they throw rings on rods, and other sports. She learns to play a synthesizer-like musical instrument. She buys a pet (a kiri). She is living the normal life of a szúni child, and is a great philosopher at the same time.
The situation on Sỳÿndoṙeìa is becoming increasingly tense. Åmmaĩt is now the only person in their diplomatic body the szúni are willing to negotiate with, because he is a friend of Ninda and she told them he is a good person. The sỳÿndoṙ intelligence arranges a racist attack against some szúni in a sỳÿndoṙ town. In response, the Brotherhood orders all of its ships to take off from Sỳÿndoṙeìa’s planets, evacuating all of its citizens, leaving the country and severing even the hyperphone lines. Åmmaĩt doesn’t wait to become a scapegoat. He leaves the country with his girlfriend Ḩaỳŷt. They apply for the political refugee status at the Brotherhood, but the szúni want him to work for them as the ambassador to Sỳÿndoṙeìa, and this requires citizenship. Soon both of them join Ninda on board of the Aulang Laip, travelling homewards to celebrate the namindan (a year-long holiday held every 12 years).
Arriving to Szúnahaum in the Cloud, they become acquainted with the weirdest world in the Galaxy with human inhabitants. Ninda is continuously travelling around, wanting to see everything. Åmmaĩt and Ḩaỳŷt (in szúni spelling, Ámmaít and Hait) want to be near her, loving her as a daughter or something close to that (for Ninda refuses an adoption), but they aren’t comfortable with this way of living. Ninda announces that she’ll settle in the city of Jasszani, allowing them to live a settled life while staying close to her.
Part Two (work in progress)
36 years later (by szúni calendar, of course) they’re still living in Jasszani. Ámmaít and Hait, now married, are raising two little twin girls, along with several pets. Ninda and Szinensi leave the Cloud on board Angaur Dzsúrarengi, wanting to travel to Saunis (pronounced as if it was in Finnish), but they won’t reveal to anyone why. They learned the language in the meantime.
During the trip of about four szúni years, via several worlds of different countries, Ninda’s fame is constantly rising in a growing area on the spiral arm, now also as a singer-songwriter, whenever she writes a song and sings it on a world.
On Saunis, which is a small planet covered with jungle, they meet Aini, a girl of their age with whom they fall in love, and soon they become a couple (all three). They stay on Saunis for a longer time, then Aini leaves along with them, now a naturalized szúni citizen.
On Sỳÿndoṙeìa, one governmental crisis follows another. The feud between the regime and the ÀLAN is irreconciliable. The ÀLAN has formed workgroups of volunteers who care for teaching, food, shelter and healthcare for the poor, first in secret, then openly, and the government doesn’t dare to ban it, although it hates it. Among the volunteers is Dẁnśy, a boy of Ninda’s age who is corresponding with Ninda and doing so in strict secrecy since his father is Vỳḩaůteń, the Sỳÿndoṙeìan vice foreign minister who is fed up with Ninda. But when he is informed about his son’s voluntary work, his reaction is an intelligent disagreement.
Ninda decides she wants to visit Sỳÿndoṙeìa where she is the hope of the nation. But there is only one way to achieve this with the diplomatic and trade contact between the Brotherhood and Sỳÿndoṙeìa severed.
Ninda’s reception on Sỳÿndoṙeìa is like a national holiday, but she wants to speak to the dictator first. Supported by the Brotherhood’s forces, she goes to the presidential office with Szinensi and Aini, and asks him some questions. Ḱïyṙeàn must admit he cannot give answers that she would be able to accept. Åmmaĩt, as the representative of the szúni nation, removes both him and the cabinet from power.
Ninda travels around the worlds of Sỳÿndoṙeìa and talks with the people. She’s received everywhere with the greatest love and honor. Finishing her tour, she gives her legendary cap to Dẁnśy and leaves the country on Sileni Fónird, which soon changes course in response to a large earthquake on a neighboring single-planet country to which they can bring assistance.
Ninda, Aini and Szinensi rescue a little girl from under the ruins of her house. She is only 35 years old (by szúni calendar, of course), seriously injured and who has lost all her family. The girls decide to adopt her. Her new name is Sileni.
(to be continued – work in progress)
Part Three (coming later)
Part Four (unsure if it’s going to be written or not)
86 thousand words, 2006, coauthored by Láng Krisztina, my late first wife
Part One
In 2065, the Royce family – 14 year old Sara, 12 year old twins Katie and Ken plus their parents who are both university professors of physics – move to a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada. Sara is stunned on learning the school she’ll attend is named after Sarah Royce, a 19th century writer of local fame, whose name differs from hers by just a single letter. The kids in the school mock her, saying she came from the 19th century. A talk on time travel inspires Sara to think about this.
She discovers several Royce’s Laws on quantum mechanics, and some on time travel. The family starts working on designing a time machine, buying a Ford van and building the time travel equipment into it. They gradually invent a completely navigable time travelling vehicle, complete with the time viewer, a temporal camera that can look into different times.
The first manned temporal trip leads ten thousand years into the past, without mishap. But the second one happens by accident, when the parents aren’t in the timeford, just the kids. They go back to the 18th century, scaring a boy who was there with his sheep. They return immediately to the 21st century.
Calling their parents reveals they are at work as normal – but that can’t be the case as they went on research leave because of the time machine. But now they didn’t ever build any time machine.
We’ve changed history, Sara says.
Part Two
Now they’re on a different timeline. The differences seem small: they’re still living in the house and are still the children of their parents, but they never built a time machine. The family, of course, is present in full on this timeline too, including the kids who, returning from school, are dumbfounded on seeing themselves and learning that they invented the time machine.
It turns out the school is now named after John Lennon. Sarah Royce disappeared from history. Her name gave the inspiration for Sara to develop the time machine, but with the school now having another name, this hasn’t happened and there is no time machine. They try to discover the link between the frightened shepherd boy and Sarah Royce who was born a century later, but to no avail, so they decide they must reinstall Sarah Royce back into history.
On their first trip of exploration in 1883, they meet a man, Ebenezer Thornpike, who calls himself a scientist – he’s an old bachelor living on his property, crafting things and reading books on science. Judging him trustful, they tell him the whole story, and even bring him back to the 21st century. Ebenezer, now the greatest admirer of 21st century technology, helps them to recreate the image of Sarah Royce, framed as a distant relative of his, recently orphaned and therefore moving here to live with her only remaining relative. The little town of 1883 appreciates Sarah – played by both Saras, alternating – and she becomes a well known figure in the town’s life for some months, up until they arrange her death by falling into the river, with her body never found. Before leaving 1883, the Saras tell their good friend Ebenezer that he’ll leave no trace in the future; no invention or other deed will be connected to his name. He sells his property and leaves the 19th century with them.
But the problem persists.
Part Three
They discover that Sarah’s books, donated by Ebenezer to the town library after her death, had disappeared from the library between 1935 and 1937. Ebenezer, under the name Harry Potter, applies for employment in the library in 1935 and manages to place other copies on the shelves and in the catalog. But this doesn’t solve the problem.
Finally they discover there is an additional member of Sara’s school class who wasn’t there originally. They need to go back to 1987 and 1982 to derail the family tree and make the additional schoolmate non-existent, until they finally succeed: the Royce family is now complete, both ones.
They announce time travel to the world. They receive three Nobel prizes and worldwide fame. A year later, the Royce Temporal Physical Research Center is founded.
Four years after their adventures, on their 18th birthday, both Sara One and Two Royces marry Ebenezer Thornpike.
40 thousand words, 1999
Sophie Vaudrois, 13 years old, has been living in a small village in Brittany with distant relatives since she lost her mother Jeanne in a recent car accident. Forlorn and fighting with suicidal thoughts, she finds an old paper box with her mother’s letters from the time before she was born. She learns that Jeanne went to Paris at age 14 with a group and stayed there during the students’ revolt. Later she met a businessman with a white Citroën, whom she caught cheating on her, and left Paris, pregnant with Sophie.
Sophie, very upset, travels to Bordeaux, to Jeanne’s friend Martine Boisrond, with whom the most important letters were exchanged. Martine, who didn’t dare yet tell Sophie that she and her husband have applied to adopt her, confesses she doesn’t know who her father is. Sophie decides to find him, immediately. Martine and Jean-Pierre feel they must help her, but Sophie leaves them due to a misunderstanding, offended.
In Avignon, she meets a girl about 16 in fancy dress, Nat, who Sophie takes for a prostitute. Nat takes Sophie home with her.
Meanwhile, it occurs to the Boisronds that Sophie takes her amateur radio everywhere, so they call Sophie’s friend Françoise in Brittany for the callsign. Next day Françoise calls their schoolmates and announces they must save Sophie.
Walking around in Avignon, Sophie runs across François Charvel, a travelling agent she knows from home. He is easy to persuade not to call the police: she saved his life and he feels in her debt. Nat, who is actually a librarian and wears an ordinary outfit on workdays, and François begin organizing the search for Sophie’s father.
However, it’s Françoise who works out how they might find a trace of Sophie’s father. They must look for a piece of paper with any information on it – a name, a phone number or anything – which Jeanne Vaudrois didn’t notice and therefore didn’t throw out. Sophie’s uncle Gaston manages to reach Sophie by amateur radio, but Sophie won’t tell him where she is; only that she’s got lodging and that an old acquaintance is taking care of her. And she gives her permission for Françoise and the other kids to be allowed into their house, which is currently locked.
Seven children enter the house and go through everything. Meanwhile, Sophie and Nat find a possible source of information nearby and go there, but to no avail as the man doesn’t know anything. After a disagreement with Nat, an offended Sophie runs away, directly into the path of a car, and wakes up in the hospital with a broken arm.
On the second day of the house search, they find a postcard of an American hotel, sent to Jeanne at Christmas, 1971 when she was in love with a businessman signing himself as “your love, Antoine.” Françoise calls Martine, who’s not very impressed since she’d rather find Sophie than her father.
Gaston cannot reach Sophie as she’s in the hospital, while her radio was broken in the accident. Talking with Martine, he recollects what Sophie said about an old acqaintance. Everyone Sophie knows lives in Brittany, but they’re sure Sophie isn’t in that region. Gaston can only think of two people who are old acquaintances of Sophie and are currently away. One of them is François Charvel.
Françoise is called from Connecticut and informed about the businessman Antoine Jeanneau, complete with his home and work address.
An old sailor in Sophie’s village knows the phone number of the place where François Charvel stays when not travelling, and leaves a message there.