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Where to start reading Ismail Kadare’s books

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Ismail Kadare, 1936 – 2024

The Doll

From 'a novelist of dazzling mastery' (Independent) and the winner of the first ever Man Booker International Prize: a novel about creative origin and aspiration, inspired by the author's own mother and his childhood in Albania

An essential work. The Doll is mesmerising, and like Kadare’s family home conceals both darkness and flashes of light in its interior

The poignant observation, bitter irony and misspoken fear running through the narrator’s central relationship with his mother, a woman secretly terrified of being disowned as unworthy the moment her son achieves the fame he so desires, are what dominate this fascinating study of a difficult love.

In a properly ordered world, Ismail Kadare would by now have got the Nobel prize for literature. By any reckoning, he is one of the most important living European writers, a man whose work is as compelling as any novelist to have emerged from the vanished world that was the Communist bloc

Laconic, sinister and drily funny... Miss this fatalistic, deadpan wit, well served in John Hodgson’s nicely crafted translation, and you miss something essential in Kadare.

Albania's greatest living novelist has invariably explored his country’s repressive political legacy in his strange and brilliant novels... [The Doll] can only enrich our understanding and appreciation of Kadare’s writing.

An evocative, captivating story. Every word of this short book is there for a reason. The considered, precise language (translator John Hodgson has done a fine job) leads smoothly through various – no doubt carefully selected – life events with The Doll being the thread which holds it all together... It’s a category-defying feat of literary engineering by a writer who is totally in control.

One of the world's greatest living writers

He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his owl soil

Kadare's fiction evades ideologies, escaping into richer realms of the past, of myth, folklore and dystopian fantasy

Ismail Kadare (1936–2024) is Albania's best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Jerusalem Prize in 2015, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2019 and the Neustadt Prize in 2020.

Young Ismail's world centres around his mother. 
 
Naïve and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband's imposing house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon. Yet despite her youthful nature, she is not without her own enigmas. Most of all, she fears that her intellectual, radical son will exchange her for a superior mother when he becomes a famous writer. 
 
From the winner of the first ever Man Booker International Prize, this is a disarming story of home and creative ambition, of personal and political freedom. Rooted in the author's own childhood in Albania, it is dedicated to the memory of his mother. 
 
‘A master storyteller’ John Carey 
 
'Laconic, sinister and drily funny' Spectator

The Traitor's Niche

A surreal, chilling tale of rebellion and tyranny in the Ottoman Empire, by the winner of the Man Booker International Prize.

The narrative unfurls with the shifting intensity of a dream, enriched by unsettlingly surreal details... It is a brilliant examination of the way that authoritarian structures operate: Kafka on a grander political scale.

Although on the surface this is a deeply compelling historical novel, its scope is wider. At heart, what Kadare seeks to demonstrate is the terrible nature of a world in which every human element is suborned to the state... Kadare well deserves his growing European audience.

An extraordinary and complex novel whose time has come...40 years after its initial publication [in Albanian]

In John Hodgson’s lucid translation, The Traitor’s Niche is absorbing from start to finish. Kadare’s allegorical burlesque has rarely been so trenchant.

The novel is a hymn to language, something that, as Ottoman bureaucrats intent on obliterating it instinctively know, and as Kadare’s novels prove, is not easily silenced

Daily Telegraph Best Books for Summer 2017

Kadare [writes] with a sense of irony and a dark humour that often rise to the heights of absurdity, even when describing the most extreme situations.

Kadare has said that he believes “dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible”. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship and this extraordinary novel, though tempered and surreal, is an unquestionably defiant one.

A wonderful exploration of European and Ottoman history that is not easily put down once opened. The examination of imperial politics and people’s desire for independence is riveting and imaginative

Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2015.

A surreal, chilling tale of rebellion and tyranny in the Ottoman Empire, by the winner of the Man Booker International Prize. 
 
At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the main square of Constantinople, a niche is carved into ancient stone. Here, the sultan displays the severed heads of his adversaries. Tundj Hata, the imperial courier, is charged with transporting heads to the capital – a task he relishes and performs with fervour. But as he travels through obscure and impoverished territories, he makes money from illicit side-shows, offering villagers the spectacle of death. The head of the rebellious Albanian governor would fetch a very high price. A surreal tale of rebellion and tyranny from the master of European literature. 
 
'A master storyteller' John Carey

A Girl in Exile

A stunning, deeply affecting portrait of life and love under surveillance, infused with myth, wry humour and the chilling absurdity of a paranoid regime.

Powerful, empathetic, at times harrowing... executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness... A chilling, humane and strangely beautiful work

[Kadare] captures the paranoid nature of life under constant surveillance...and produces an ironic masterpiece

Filled with striking images and conceits… a powerful Kafkaesque charge… Kadare’s imaginative intelligence ensures that it is chilling and intriguing

A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make - as Kadare himself had to do

The literature Kadare has produced in the face of obstacles lesser writers would find insuperable, is, genuinely, of world significance... Invites comparison with Milan Kundera's recent satire on Stalinism, The Festival of Insignificance. Both writers are favourites, year-in, year-out for the Nobel prize. Kadare will not damage his prospects with A Girl in Exile

Coolly ironic writing, which traverses ominous themes of censorship and state control… Kadare masterfully conjures an atmosphere of paranoia… This powerful novel is a monument

Melodrama, tragedy and myth illuminate the relationship between individual and state in a fine novel from the great Albanian writer

Kadare is a master at braiding narrative strands… A Girl in Exile is one of Kadare’s best novels, and essential reading for our morally uneasy times’

Kadare’s fiction evades ideologies, escaping into richer realms of the past, of myth, folklore and dystopian fantasy. At their best, his works are certainly subversive; but they cannot be pigeonholed, even into that worthy category… it is profoundly intriguing — not least in the suggestion of the deep imaginative complicity with one’s subject matter that is needed by every true writer

The intricate mystery that ensues has a mythical dimension: Kadare doesn’t gloss the setting or period and he makes you work hard to figure out what’s actually happening, let alone what it might mean… While the contortions of totalitarianism are vivid…It’s the surreal psychosexual element that unsettles you most

Kadare is a writer who excels in the cataloguing of human errors and horrors… [His] work remains peculiar, local and challenging… The prose is pleasingly odd, the locutions and idioms strained and startling

Closer to the heart of the mystery, mythic allusions and one horribly convincing central concept confer a new power on an increasingly unusual tale

A withering indictment of the absurdity of totalitarianism and the plodding cowardice of its apparatchiks, and a poignant tribute to lives senselessly wrecked by the psychopathic officiousness of dogma… It is an affirmation of the dissident power of the writer word, which can be repressed but never effaced

In its primal eeriness feels like something found in an ancient ballad… The novel seem[s] to live in two planes; the body’s, constrained by politics and violence, and the soul’s, where anything is possible. If this is a kind of freedom, Kadare shows that it comes at a terrible price

Blending Kafkaesque paranoia and sombre humanism, A Girl in Exile is a withering indictment of the absurdity of totalitarianism and the plodding cowardice of its apparatchiks, and a poignant tribute to lives senselessly wrecked by the psychopathic officiousness of dogma. Above all, though, it is an affirmation of the dissident power of the written word, which can be repressed but never effaced

Will this be the year when Ismail Kadare finally gets his Nobel? Maybe A Girl in Exile…will help

A Girl in Exile is the work of a historic talent who is still at the peak of his power. It confirms Kadare to be the best writer at work today who remembers—almost aggressively so, refusing to forget—European totalitarianism.

When a girl is found dead with a signed copy of Rudian Stefa’s latest book in her possession, the author finds himself summoned for an interview by the Party Committee. 
 
Unable to guess what transgression he has committed Rudian goes fearfully to meet his interrogators. He has never met the girl in question but he remembers signing the book. As the influence of a paranoid regime steals up on him, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to the mysterious girl to whom he wrote the dedication – to Linda B. 
 
‘Powerful, empathetic, at times harrowing... executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness... A chilling, humane and strangely beautiful work’ Independent

The Three-Arched Bridge

A hard-hitting parable about the conflicts that have ravaged the Balkan states, by Albania’s most influential novelist.

His ability to spin eerie parables out of a little-known national history makes his books an addictive pleasure

A compelling investigation into language and myth, politics and power, by the renowned, infinitely talented Albanian novelist

[Kadare] is seemingly incapable of writing a book that fails to be interesting

In Ismail Kadare's fictional worlds creation and destruction are entwined, and how he illuminates the human cost of their varied pairings is the source of his greatness as a writer

Little in the modern canon is more locally remote from us than the writing of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, and not much is more universal in its reach… Kadare, who lived under the dictator Enver Hoxha until moving to France, is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression

A prolific and stylistically versatile author who has sought to explain his problematic country through massive political epics as well as in novellas that variously take shape as allegories, folk tales, magical autobiography or ancient Albanian history

Kadare and Andric share a sense of incisive imagery, all too relevant, in which a Balkan bridge links present and future, at the sacrifice of humanity

Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 in the mountain town of Gjirokaster, near the Greek border, is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Since the appearance of The General of the Dead Army in 1965, Kadare has published scores of stories and novels that make up a panorama of Albanian history linked by a constant meditation on the nature and human consequences of dictatorship. His works brought him into frequent conflict with the authorities from 1945 to 1985. In 1990 he sought political asylum in France, and now divides his time between Paris and Tirana. He is the winner of the first ever Man Booker International Prize.

A hard-hitting parable about the conflicts that have ravaged the Balkan states, by Albania’s most influential novelist. 
 
When the construction of a bridge built to link the Balkans to Europe is repeatedly and mysteriously sabotaged, an old ballad starts making the rounds at local taverns. The bards sing of a legend – a woman immured in a castle wall to prevent it from falling. Some say the bridge is being damaged by local ferrymen, others blame the vengeful water spirits. But this is a town where terror and superstition reign and a solution must be reached. So it is decreed: a willing person must be plastered into the bridge… 
 
‘A vivid, macabre and wise novel’ New York Times

The Concert

A chilling portrait of life under Communist rule by Albania's most important writer

His finest book is The Concert, an epic study of the Albanians when living under the thumb of their sole world ally, the Chinese. It is half realism, half Borgesian, and the form and content jointly stun

The Concert is a splendidly deep and serious novel that entirely transcends, as it were, its unremarkable outer garment… Kadare's achievement is to dramatise truthfully throughout. This is a book to read and re-read

It is Shakespearian in its sweep of history with its insertions of poetic and theatrical farce and its description of the contortions Albanians had to perform to survive Marxist doctrine

The Concert is among the richest, most complex and most challenging works of his fictional cycle… Kadare's achievement is to have found once again the set of tricks that create the illusion of real life on the printed page

He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare’s is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil

Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 in the mountain town of Gjirokastër, near the Greek border, is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Since the appearance of The General of the Dead Army in 1965, Kadare has published scores of stories and novels that make up a panorama of Albanian history linked by a constant meditation on the nature of the human consequences of dictatorship. Kadare's works brought him into frequent conflict with the authorities from 1945 to 1985. In 1990 he sought political asylum in France, and now divides his time between Paris and Tirana. He is the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize.

A chilling portrait of life under Communist rule by Albania's most important writer 
 
It's the 1970s and cracks are starting to appear in the alliance between China and its Communist cohort Albania. When an Albanian steps on the foot of a Chinese diplomat the tension cranks up – couriers between Tirana and Beijing carry annotated x-rays of the foot back and forth. The Chinese intend to punish their interfering little ally discreetly. But is the Sino-Albanian axis about to come adrift? This is Kadare’s surreal black comedy about the inner sanctums of political power and the mysterious causal chains that transform ordinary lives. 
 
‘The Concert is a splendidly deep and serious novel that entirely transcends, as it were, its unremarkable outer garment… Kadare's achievement is to dramatise truthfully throughout. This is a book to read and re-read’ Guardian

The Pyramid

Kadare's classic parable of life under a communist dictatorship

[Kadare] chronicled the dark years of dictatorship in masterpieces such as The Pyramid

A haunting sense of time moving backwards and forwards like a train at a terminus, an authentic sense of adventure, and an extraordinary facility with metaphor take over… Kadare's new novel is mesmerising.

A vast, deep, obsessive parable. Like every parable, its fundamental significance transcends its apparent meaning

A masterpiece... A hauntingly beautiful parable woven from the fabric of history yet timeless in its reach

In the end, this book - which does not have (or need) a conventional plot, protagonist or conflict - adds up to a haunting meditation on the matter-of-fact brutality of political despotism, the harshness of life among the humble and powerless, and the vastness, ubiquity and stonelike permanence of death, which treats all humanity as equals.

Discover Kadare's classic parable of life under a communist dictatorship 
 
When the new Egyptian Pharaoh decrees that he does not want a pyramid built in his honour his advisers are aghast. It is their firm belief that peace and prosperity only make the people more difficult to control – they must be kept under the whip. So the Pharaoh agrees to the construction of a pyramid colossal beyond imagining, an edifice that crushes dozens of people as each block is added and which inexorably drains the lifeblood from the country. As Egypt builds its monument to death, its neighbours plot and gloat… 
 
‘He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare’s is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil’ Independent on Sunday

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

A story of a country attempting to reconcile its new freedom with old rituals, secrets and betrayals.

One of the many pleasures of Mr Kadare's writing is his supremely light touch

The themes are so sinister, the prose so genial. Post-communist disillusion and southern playfulness are blended here with such skill and subtlety that one almost fails to register Kadare's shocking originality

He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare is an original voice, universal, yet deeply rooted in his own soul

From behind the closed door, the man shouts, 'Be on your way - you have no business here!' 
 
'Open up, I am the messenger of Death'. 
 
As spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town of B, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers strike the National Bank. Old terrors are dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And ultra-explosive state secrets are threatening to flood the entire nation. Mark, an artist, finds the peaceful rhythms of his life turned upside down by ancient love and modern barbarism and by the particular brutality of a country surprised and divided by its new freedom. 
 
‘One of the many pleasures of Mr Kadare's writing is his supremely light touch’ New York Times

Three Elegies For Kosovo

In three short narratives, Kadare evokes a defining moment in European history

The main goal of these three fables ... is to transmit a message about freedom, in the sense that to write truthfully is to set something free.  In this book Kadare has set Kosovo, the battle, the myth, free from the chains of untruth

The bridge is a foreboding, an omen, a threat.  It is a bridge over which Asia will invade Europe and the future will invade the past.  Kadare, an Albanian, has used the materials at hand to become one of Europe's great writers

An utterly captivating yarn: strange, vivid, ominous, macabre and wise

In three short narratives, Kadare evokes a defining moment in European history 
 
28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since. 
 
28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo. 
 
In three short narratives Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century. 
 
‘An utterly captivating yarn: strange, vivid, ominous, macabre and wise’ New York Times

Broken April

'By any standard this is a considerable novel' Sunday Telegraph

His work is as immense as Balzac's, as unrelenting in its critique of dictatorship as Orwell's, and as disturbingly fantastical as Kafka's. It is an invention as well as a reflection of what it means to be Albanian, and an exploration of both the ugliness and the dignity of a small, ancient, oppressed nation. Kadare is perhaps the last 'national writer' of European history

Broken April, a haunting account of the paroxism of the vendetta in northern Albania between the wars, is one of the twin peaks of Kadare's career

The story is plain, the telling plainer, yet the overall effect is mysterious and elusive as only a fable can be

With Broken April Mr Kadare comes to the forefront as a major international novelist

Forcefully and simply written...completely authentic

From the moment that Gjorg's brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit. 
 
The code of Kanun requires Gjorg to kill his brother's murderer and then in turn be hunted down. After shooting his brother's killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days' grace - not enough to see out the month of April. 
 
Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride's heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these 'civilised' strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta. 
 
'One of the most remarkable European novelists of the twentieth century' Independent

The File on H

A haunting yet humorous evocation of a society dangerously trapped in its past.

Witty and touching. It consolidates Kadare's reputation as one of the finest writers to emerge from communist Europe

A wicked and amusing satire of provincial life...it is also an elegiac celebration of the power of poetry

Knife-sharp satire...originality shines through

Anyone still wondering why Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for literature in 2005 will be enlightened by this tragicomic gem

Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 in the mountain town of Gjirokaster, near the Greek border, is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Since the appearance of The General of the Dead Army in 1965, Kadare has published scores of stories and novels that make up a panorama of Albanian history linked by a constant meditation on the nature and human consequences of dictatorship. Kadare's works brought him into frequent conflict with the authorities from 1945 to 1985. In 1990 he sought political asylum in France, and now divides his time between Paris and Tirana. He is the winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize.

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder (a 'new fangled' invention) in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. 
 
Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer's epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. But the local Governor believes its an elaborate spying mission and arranges for his own spy to follow them.The two dedicated scholars realise only too late that they have stumbled over an ants' nest. 
 
This simple tale by Albania's most eminent and gifted novelist serves to lift the veil on one of the most secret and mysterious countries of modern Europe. 
 
‘Witty and touching. It consolidates Kadare's reputation as one of the finest writers to emerge from communist Europe’ Sunday Times

General Of The Dead Army

Albania: once a battlefield, now a charnel-house. And yet, life goes on . . .This sweeping epic of post-war Albania was Kadare's first novel.

He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil

Azar Nafisi, Man Booker judge and author of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'

With its metonymic realism and fidelity to its characters, The General of the Dead Army reminds us why his work is so valued

Literary gold dust - haunting, bleakly comedic and ultimately horrific

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his country's dead. 
 
Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission, and their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing. 
 
‘He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil’ Independent on Sunday

The Palace Of Dreams

A novel which arose from the author's ambition to invent a hell of his own, Kadare's macabre vision of tyranny and oppression was banned immediately when it first appeared in Albania in 1981.

Kadare's most daring novel, one of the most complete visions of totalitarianism ever committed to paper

If there is a book worth banning in a dictatorship, this is it

Kadare's delicately misted view of another world (as much internal as totalitarian) lives up to the splendour of his title

Discover a novel which arose from the author's ambition to invent a hell of his own. Kadare's macabre vision of tyranny was banned immediately when it first appeared in Albania in 1981. 
 
At the heart of the Sultan's vast empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams. 
 
 Inside, the dreams of every citizen are collected, sorted and interpreted in order to identify the 'master-dreams' that will provide the clues to the Empire's destiny and that of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus meticulously laid bare and at the mercy of its government... 
 
Translated by Barbara Bray from the French version of the Albanian by Jusuf Vrioni

Ismail Kadare

John Hodgson

One of Europe's most decorated authors... Seasoned fans [of Kadare] will be enthralled by this very personal meditation on the circumstances in which, against the odds, he [Pasternak] still managed to thrive

An inquiry concerning power, artistic integrity, fame, memory and more… A Dictator Calls is slim, but its themes are not… the riddles of this novel are still ringing in my mind

Albania’s greatest living writer… A Dictator Calls is a thought-provoking consideration of the relationship between writers and tyranny, with John Hodgson’s translation gracefully rendering Kadare’s imagination.

Rich material from this ever-intriguing writer

**LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024** 
 
'Comrade Stalin wishes to speak with you.' 
 
A fascinating exploration of the relationship between writers and tyranny, from the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize. 
 
In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. 
 
Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare's experience writing under dictatorship, when he received an unexpected phone call of his own. 
 
Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson 
 
‘One of Europe's most decorated authors... Seasoned fans [of Kadare] will be enthralled’ Sunday Times

Ismail Kadare

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Ismail Kadare, 1936 – 2024

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