A Girl in Exile

Powerful, empathetic, at times harrowing… executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness… A chilling, humane and strangely beautiful work * Independent *[Kadare] captures the paranoid nature of life under constant surveillance…and produces an ironic masterpiece * Daily Mail *Filled with striking images and conceits… a powerful Kafkaesque charge… Kadare’s imaginative intelligence ensures that it is chilling and intriguing – Theo Tait * Sunday Times *A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make - as Kadare himself had to do – John Banville * Financial Times *The literature Kadare has produced in the face of obstacles lesser writers would find insuperable, is, genuinely, of world significance… Invites comparison with Milan Kundera’s recent satire on Stalinism, The Festival of Insignificance. Both writers are favourites, year-in, year-out for the Nobel prize. Kadare will not damage his prospects with A Girl in Exile – John Sutherland * The Times *Coolly ironic writing, which traverses ominous themes of censorship and state control… Kadare masterfully conjures an atmosphere of paranoia… This powerful novel is a monument – Francesca Wade * Daily Telegraph *Melodrama, tragedy and myth illuminate the relationship between individual and state in a fine novel from the great Albanian writer * Guardian *Kadare is a master at braiding narrative strands… A Girl in Exile is one of Kadare’s best novels, and essential reading for our morally uneasy times’ – Alberto Manguel * Times Literary Supplement *Kadare’s fiction evades ideologies, escaping into richer realms of the past, of myth, folklore and dystopian fantasy. At their best, his works are certainly subversive; but they cannot be pigeonholed, even into that worthy category… it is profoundly intriguing — not least in the suggestion of the deep imaginative complicity with one’s subject matter that is needed by every true writer – Caroline Moore * Spectator *The intricate mystery that ensues has a mythical dimension: Kadare doesn’t gloss the setting or period and he makes you work hard to figure out what’s actually happening, let alone what it might mean… While the contortions of totalitarianism are vivid…It’s the surreal psychosexual element that unsettles you most – Anthony Cummins * Prospect *

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.

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