Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Born in 1936, Ismail Kadare was Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. In 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for 'a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact'. He is the recipient of the highly prestigious 2009 Principe de Asturias de las Letras in Spain. He died in 2024, aged 88.
David Bellos, Director of the Program in Translation at Princeton University, is also the translator of Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual and a winner of the Goncourt Prize for biography. He has translated seven of Ismail Kadare's novels, and in 2005 was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his translations of Kadare's work.
Brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania. <i>The Successor</i> provides a mesmerically readable parable about the abuse of state power.
* Observer *
One of the most compelling novelists now writing.
* Wall Street Journal *
Suffused with the power of thought and feeling. Above all, Kadare creates a haunting sense of the absurd.
* Sunday Times *
From his youthful obsessions with Shakespeare and Homer, Kadare has retained not just a love of mystery and wit and a facility for clear, bleak language, but a sense of the text's own mystery and the impossibility of fully penetrating it... There is certainly nothing run-of-the-mill about Kadare's biting parable of tyranny.
* Australian Financial Review *
The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14.
Did he kill himself or was he murdered?
This question slices through Ismail Kadare's masterful psychological thriller. As the state insists that the future leader died by his own hand, the rest of the world begins to have doubts. As the tension builds and rumours escalate, Kadare draws us into a nightmarish world controlled by rules no one understands, blending dream and reality to produce a mystery and a thriller that seduces and surprises up to the last page.
The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14.
Did he kill himself or was he murdered?
This question slices through Ismail Kadare's masterful psychological thriller. As the state insists that the future leader died by his own hand, the rest of the world begins to have doubts. Tension builds and rumours escalate, while Kadare draws us into a nightmarish world controlled by rules no one understands, blending dream and reality to produce a mystery and a thriller that seduces and surprises up to the last page.
"Combines all the readability of a crime novel with the innovatory adventurousness of a work created by a writer who never repeats others, much less himself ... The Successor [is] a brilliant autopsy on the corpse of a ghastly regime."
Francis King, Spectator
Translated by David Bellos
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Born in 1936, Ismail Kadare was Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. In 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for 'a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact'. He is the recipient of the highly prestigious 2009 Principe de Asturias de las Letras in Spain. He died in 2024, aged 88.
David Bellos, Director of the Program in Translation at Princeton University, is also the translator of Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual and a winner of the Goncourt Prize for biography. He has translated seven of Ismail Kadare's novels, and in 2005 was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his translations of Kadare's work.