Yesterday

Sandor Lester, a Hungarian exile living under a pseudonym, works in a Swiss watch factory doing monotonous, soul-crushing precision work. Every day is the same: waking at dawn, catching the crowded bus, repetitive factory shifts, and hollow Saturday encounters with Yolande, a woman he does not love. To endure his alienation, Sandor retreats into writing poetry and imagining an idealized lost soulmate named Line. When a new immigrant arrives at the factory and turns out to be the real Line—his childhood soulmate and half-sister from Hungary—Sandor’s fragile boundary between memory, longing, and devastating reality begins to unravel. Lyrical, haunting, and deeply melancholic, Yesterday is a masterwork of exile, obsessive love, and existential displacement by the acclaimed author of The Notebook Trilogy, Ágota Kristóf.