Phoenix-like the Hungarian people survived the horrors of the war, the disappointment of the first socialist republic, the disillusion of the brief but terrifying communist rule of Bela Kun, and the bitterness of seeing their beloved country dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon. This is the world that Miklos Banffy describes in the Phoenix Land.

The final part of Banffy's trilogy reflects the rapidly disintegrating course of events in Central Europe. In the foreground the lives of Balint, with his ultimately unhappy love for Adrienne, and his fatally flawed cousin, Laszlo Gyeroffy, who dies in poverty and neglect, are told with humour and a bitter-sweet nostalgia for a paradise lost through folly. The sinister and fast moving events in Montenegro, the Balkan wars, the apparent encirclement of Germany and Austria-Hungary by Britain, France and Russia, and finally the assassination of Franz Ferdinand all lead inexorably to the youth of Hungary marching off to their death and the dismemberment of their country.