Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
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.<b>An essential work.</b> <i>The Doll </i>is <b>mesmerising</b>, and like Kadare’s family home conceals both darkness and flashes of light in its interior
- Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times
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<b> fascinating study of a difficult love</b>.
- John Burnside, Guardian
In a properly ordered world, Ismail Kadare would by now have got the Nobel prize for literature. By any reckoning, he is <b>one of the most important living European writers</b>, a man whose work is as <b>compelling</b> as any novelist to have emerged from the vanished world that was the Communist bloc
- Melanie McDonagh, Evening Standard
<b>Laconic, sinister and drily funny</b>... Miss this fatalistic, deadpan wit, well served in John Hodgson’s nicely crafted translation, and you miss something essential in Kadare.
- Boyd Tonkin, Spectator
<b>Albania's greatest living novelist</b> has invariably explored his country’s repressive political legacy in his strange and brilliant novels... [<i>The Doll</i>] can only enrich our understanding and appreciation of Kadare’s writing.
Daily Mail
An <b>evocative, captivating</b> 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.
Bookmunch
A master storyteller
John Carey
[A] coldly brilliant novel
- Kevin Brazil, Times Literary Supplement
A novelist of dazzling mastery
Independent
One of the world's greatest living writers