★An autobiographical novel by Géza Ottlik, a leading author of Hungarian psychological fiction and winner of Kossuth Prize, Hungary's highest national honor for literature.
★One of the best Hungarian works of the 20th century and was held up as a model of innovative Hungarian literary in the 1970s.
★The author portrays the life of three boys in a military school to reflect the social and psychological changes in Hungary after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
★In the 1950s, the book was translated into English, French, German, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Estonian, Croatian, Romanian, Polish, Swedish, Slovenian, Slovak.

School at the Frontier (Iskola a határon) tells the story of three boys starting military school in north-west Hungary, near the border and of how they manage to conform to life in this harsh, highly disciplined and exclusive institution. Ottlik prefaces the actual story with an introductory chapter on the difficulty of writing.
The novel was not at all an instant success when first published in 1959. However, in the course of time it became a seminal piece of work for later generations of readers and writers alike.Ottlik first submitted the manuscript for publication in 1948 under a different title, but withdraw it and went on to rewrite the text thoroughly before he was satisfied with it.

It is not necessary to adapt to the world, but to do it, not to redefine what is already in it, but to add it ever.

Géza Ottlik (1912 – 1990)
Géza Ottlik was a Hungarian writer, translator, mathematician, and bridge theorist. According to an American obituary bridge column, he was known in Hungary as "the ultimate authority on Hungarian prose".
Ottlik was born and died in Budapest. He attended the military school at Kőszeg and Budapest, and studied mathematics and physics at Budapest University 1931–1935. After a brief career on Hungarian radio, he was a secretary of Hungarian PEN Club from 1945 to 1957. As he was unable to publish his works for political reasons, he earned his living translating. He translated mainly from English (Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, John Osborne, Evelyn Waugh); and German (Thomas Mann, G. Keller, Stefan Zweig).
He was a passionate bridge player and advanced theoretician. In a bridge column three months after Ottlik's death, Alan Truscott placed him "among the strongest candidates" for "the bridge writer with the greatest creativity in terms of card-play theory".[1] His 1979 book Adventures in Card Play, written with Hugh Kelsey, introduced and developed many new concepts (such as Backwash squeeze and Entry-shifting squeeze). According to Truscott it "opened new frontiers" in defence as well as declarer play. In his 1995 obituary of Kelsey, Truscott wrote that it "broke new ground in many technical areas and is still considered the most advanced book on the play of the cards." An American survey of bridge experts in 2007 ranked it third on a list of their all-time favorites, nearly thirty years after its first publication.
Awards:
Ottlik received a grant from the British Government for his translations, 1960
József Attila Prize (1981)
Kossuth Prize, the highest national prize for Hungarian Literature (1985)
Ernő Szép Prize (1988)
István Örkény Prize 1990)
Righteous Among the Nations (1998)