Kaddish For An Unborn Child

A moving, mesmerising novel about the dilemma involved in bringing a child into a world in which the evil to create Auschwitz exists.

Condenses a lifetime into a story told in a single night...exhilarating for [its] creative energy

Stunning... resembles such other memorably declamatory fictions as Camus' The Fall and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground

While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertész draws us one step closer

For taking us somewhere no other writer has, Kertész fully deserved his Nobel Prize

Tim Wilkinson is a seriously good translator...I may have given the impression that this is harrowing, and it is; but it has its moments of great, consoling insight, is about far more than just the Holocaust and in its own haunting way provides comfort for the afflicted

Tim Wilkinson's translation... is a fine and powerful piece of work. ... Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic, this is a phenomenal piece of writing, showing the depth and breadth of the effects of war on its survivors

Imre Kertész was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fateless, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Imre Kertész died in Budapest in March 2016

‘A fine and powerful piece of work… Dark, at times cryptic, and hugely energetic’ Irish Times 
 
“No!" is the first word of this haunting novel. It is how a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, and it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between these two 'No!'s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertész's narrator addresses the child he couldn't bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage.

Fateless

The powerful story of an adolescent's experience of Auschwitz by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, Imre Kertész.

Should be savoured slowly . . . Only through exploring its subtlety and detail will the reader come to appreciate such an ornate and honest testimony to the human spirit

A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel

While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality for those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer

[The] crisp new translation still has an extraordinary power to shock

'While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer' Observer 
 
Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business - his final act before being sent to a labour camp. Two months later, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a 'permanent workplace'. This is the start of his journey to Auschwitz. 
 
On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of the barbarity - and beauty - he witnesses.

Liquidation

A stunning novel from the Nobel prize Laureate in Literature; the story of a Hungarian writer whose death forces his circle of friends to confront their own terrible moment in history.

A beautiful glimpse of the wide-open spaces of storytelling

A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel, which, in this fine translation, reads as if it were written in this century, not the last

‘Liquidation, suspenseful and bleakly comic, reads like a treatise on the mystery of the end of life and the mystery of suicide… A compelling if deeply unsettling work’ Independent 
 
Kingbitter, an editor at a failing publishing house, believes himself to have been the closest friend of B., a celebrated writer and Auschwitz survivor, who recently committed suicide. Amongst the papers B. has left him, Kingbitter finds a play entitled Liquidation that uncannily predicts the behaviour of B.'s ex-wife, his mistress and Kingbitter himself. As he obsessively reads and rereads the play, Kingbitter becomes transfixed with the idea that buried within these papers is B.'s great novel: the book that will explain his relationship with Auschwitz.

Imre Kertesz

Tim Wilkinson

A dark, disturbing novel, from a writer with a profound understanding of a dictatorship's inner workings

A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power

Genuinely haunting and lyrical... memorable and thought-provoking

The narrative is neat, lucid, written with admirable economy

One of the most inspired originals at work today...an astonishing performance, as terrifying as Kafka and as plausible...candid and as black as night, remarkable, alluring... How these pages shimmer with irony and astute observation

Compelling, chilling, bitter little sigh of a novel

A timely moral fable, then, but a gripping story too. With impressive economy, Kertesz creates enough round characters to populate a novel five times as long

A masterful addition to his other translated novels

‘A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power’ Times Literary Supplement 
 
From his prison cell, Antonio Martens, an interrogator for the recently fallen dictatorship, awaits execution. His charge? Multiple counts of murder; the murder of those disappeared by the state. Bereft of authority, and unable to avoid the consequences of his actions any longer, Martens turns his story to his involvement in the assassination of the high-profile Salinas family, and with it peers into the murderous mechanics of a regime bent on achieving its ends - no matter the means.

Imre Kertesz

Praise for Detective Story

A dark, disturbing novel, from a writer with a profound understanding of a dictatorship's inner workings

A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power

A powerful and troubling new novella

A dark, disturbing novel, from a writer with a profound understanding of a dictatorship's inner workings

A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power

A powerful and troubling new novella

A dark, disturbing novel, from a writer with a profound understanding of a dictatorship's inner workings

A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power

A powerful and troubling new novella

Books by Imre Kertesz

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