Two destinies intersect in Broken April. The first is that of Gjor, a young mountaineer who (much against his will) has just killed a man in order to avenge the death of his older brother, and who expects to be killed himself in keeping with the provisions of the Code that regulates life in the highlands. The second is that of a young couple on their honeymoon who have come to study the age-old customs of the place, including the blood feud.While the story is set in the early twentieth century, life on the high plateaus of Albania takes life back to the Dark Ages. The bloody shirt of the latest victim is hung up by the bereaved for all to see―until the avenger in turn kills his man with a rifle shot. For the young bride, the shock of this unending cycle of obligatory murder is devastating. The horror becomes personified when she catches a glimpse of Gjor as he wanders about the countryside, waiting for the truce of thirty days to end, and life with it. That momentary vision of the hapless murderer provokes in her a violent act of revulsion and contrition. Her life will be marked by it always.

Broken April

Literature & Fiction

Kadaré, Ismaíl

Contemporary

Harvill Press

The general of the dead army: A novel;

This sweeping epic of post-war Albania was Kadare’s first novel.Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is dispatched to Albania to recover his country’s dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission and their conversations bring out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing.

General of the Dead Army

Vintage Classics

At the heart of the Sultan's vast but fragile empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams: the most secret and powerful Ministry ever invented. Its task is to scour every town, village and hamlet to collect the citizens' dreams, then to sift, sort and classify them, and ultimately to interpret them, in order to identify the "master-dreams" that will provide the clues to the Empire's destinies and those of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus tapped into and meticulously laid bare in the form of images and symbols of the dreaming mind. Kadare's Palace of Dreams stands as the symbol of the thought-police who have, through history, been the most effective instruments of oppression at the service of dictators.

The Palace Of Dreams (Vintage Classics)

In 1377, the Balkan peninsula is a bridge between cultures. On one side lies the flotsam of the receding Byzantine empire, an unruly alliance whose peoples quarrel in half a dozen tongues; on the other, the encroaching hordes of Ottoman Turkey. On the banks of a river somewhere in between these powers, another bridge is rising. And in telling its story, Albania's greatest living writer creates what is at once a magnificently realized historical novel and a chilling parable of the new barbarism that has swept the Balkans. When mysterious acts of sabotage halt construction of the three-arched bridge, a man suspected of the crimes is discovered walled up in the foundation, with only his head protruding from the stone. Is his death meant to deter other saboteurs or to appease the spirits of the river? Does it fulfill an ancient prophecy or predict further bloodshed? Superbly written, resonant with menace and sorrow, The Three-Arched Bridge is as powerful an evocation of a vanished world as The Name of the Rose. "A vivid, macabre and wise novel, set in the 14th century, when the author's Albanian homeland was suffering disruptions that suggest the Balkans of today." - The New York Times Book Review "One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language." -Wall Street Journal "Kadare's prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." -Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Three-Arched Bridge

Vintage

From the Albanian writer who has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize comes a hypnotic narrative of ancient Egypt, a work that is at once a historical novel and an exploration of the horror of untrammeled state power. It is 2600 BC. The Pharaoh Cheops is inclined to forgo the construction of a pyramid in his honor, but his court sages hasten to persuade him otherwise. The pyramid, they tell him, is not a tomb but a paradox: it keeps the Egyptian people content by oppressing them utterly. The pyramid is the pillar that holds power aloft. If it wavers, everything collapses. And so the greatest pyramid ever begins to rise. It is a monument that crushes dozens of men with the placing of each of its tens of thousands of stones. It is the subject of real and imaginary conspiracies that necessitate ruthless purges and fantastic tortures. It is a monster that will consume all Egypt before it swallows the body of Cheops himself. As told by Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid is a tour de force of Kafkaesque paranoia and Orwellian political prophecy. "A haunting meditation on the matter-of-fact brutality of political despotism." - The New York Times Book Review "Kadare's prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." - Los Angeles Times Book Review "One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language." - Wall Street Journal

The Pyramid

A new novel from the acclaimed winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction.The Successor is a powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. The man who died was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. The world was so certain that he was next in line that he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered?The Successor is simultaneously a page-turning mystery, a historical novel – based on actual events and buttressed by the author’s private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu – and a psychological challenge to the reader to decide, How does one live when nothing is sure? The Successor seamlessly blends dream and reality, legendary past, and contemporary history, and proves again that Kadare stands alongside Márquez, Canetti, and Auster.

The Successor

Bond Street Books

A new novel from the acclaimed winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction.The Successor is a powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. The man who died was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. The world was so certain that he was next in line that he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered?The Successor is simultaneously a page-turning mystery, a historical novel – based on actual events and buttressed by the author’s private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu – and a psychological challenge to the reader to decide, How does one live when nothing is sure? The Successor seamlessly blends dream and reality, legendary past, and contemporary history, and proves again that Kadare stands alongside Márquez, Canetti, and Auster.From the Hardcover edition.

World Literature

Anchor Canada

Agamemnon's Daughter

Now in paperback, one of the novels that garnered Kadare the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for fiction, plus two stunning new stories.     Agamemnon's Daughter is an impeccably crafted, psychologically incisive tale of a disappointed lover's odyssey through a single day and his gradual realization of how the utter cruelty of dictatorship can express itself even in matters of the heart.     The day begins as the unnamed narrator waits in vain for his lover Suzana, daughter of "The Successor," even though he knows that she will have to sacrifice their love for her father's success. As he moves through the crowded streets on the great socialist holiday, May 1st, the narrator recalls episodes of his life that illustrate the vast system of absurdity, paranoia, and cruelty that was Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha.     Finally, as he watches Suzana in her decorated viewing box, the narrator realizes what her sacrifice truly means. Like that of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia, which loosed the bloody nine years of the Trojan War, Suzana's will serve to open a new floodgate of persecution and purging, from which no one will be safe.     This book also showcases two stories by this European master of fiction, "The Blinding Order," a parable about the uses of terror set in the Ottoman Empire, and "The Great Wall," a chilling duet between a Chinese official and a soldier in the invading army of the great Central Asian conqueror of the 14th century, Tamerlane.

Ismail Kadare’s classic novel of a boy’s coming of age in the midst of the horrors of war, in a stunning new translation. Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy’s eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty–as well as the simple pleasures of life. When he is evacuated to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things, but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Masterful in its simplicity, Chronicle in Stone is both a touching coming-of-age story and a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit that will remind readers of Cinema Paradiso and Empire of the Sun.

Chronicle in Stone: A Novel

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Books by Kadaré, Ismaíl

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kadaré, Ismaíl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Broken April

General of the Dead Army

The Palace Of Dreams (Vintage Classics)

The Three-Arched Bridge

The Pyramid

The Successor

The Successor

Agamemnon's Daughter

Agamemnon's Daughter

Chronicle in Stone: A Novel