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Tyranny in Tirana, a novel from the inaugural Man Booker International Prize winner based on the final days of Enver Hoxha.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

* Brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania. The Successor 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

* Brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania. The Successor 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

Kadare, the recent winner of the first Man Booker International Prize, depicts an Albania governed by the whim and vanity of the aging Guide when the Successor, second in command, is found dead in his bedroom. The international intelligence community and the citizens of Albania contemplate the questions of how the Successor fell from grace and whether he died through murder or suicide. From day to day, the official word varies as the Guide decides whether the Successor is an enemy of the state or a martyr for the party. Drawing on real events-Mehmet Shehu was poised to succeed Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha in 1981 when he mysteriously died-Kadare successfully builds suspense by portraying multiple suspects with the motivation to commit murder; all believe they are guilty of the crime in some small or large way. The story unfolds through the intimate conversations of brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, all potential victims of the Guide's unpredictable behavior, before concluding with the Successor speaking from the dead about his life and death. This dark and surreal novel is very much in keeping with Kadare's earlier works (e.g., The Three-Arched Bridge); recommended for all libraries.-Rebecca Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.