Liquidation

Liquidation

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • A beautiful glimpse of the wide-open spaces of storytelling
    Daily Telegraph

About the author

Imre Kertesz

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
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