The Convalescent is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia … and also, somehow, the story of ten thousand years of Hungarian history. Jessica Anthony, the inaugural winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, makes an unforgettable debut with an unforgettable hero: Rovar Akos Pfliegman unlikely bandit, unloved lover, and historian of the unimportant.