The Notebook Trilogy

byÁgota Kristóf, Alan Sheridan (Translator), David Watson (Translator)

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Sent to a remote village to live with their grandmother, twins Claus and Lucas devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to the ongoing horrors of war and living under a totalitarian regime. When their bond is tested, their collective ‘we’ shatters and the boys become isolated in different countries. Lucas is challenged to prove his identity and that of his missing brother, a defector to ‘the other side’.

Kristóf’s haunting and unforgettable masterpiece has been an international phenomenon ever since its first publication in French 40 years ago. Distilling the brutally fracturing effects of war and displacement onto identity and memory, and our need for stories in our search for unity and meaning, The Notebook Trilogy is stark fable of timeless relevance.

© Ágota Kristóf 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

About Ágota Kristóf

Ágota Kristóf was born in Csikvánd, Hungary, in 1935. Aged twenty-one, Kristóf and her husband and four-month-old daughter fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising to Austria and were resettled in French-speaking Switzerland. Working in a factory, Kristóf slowly learned the language of her adopted country. Her first novel, The Notebook (1986), won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages. Kristóf’s other work included plays and stories as well as The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which complete the trilogy begun with The Notebook. She died in 2011.

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