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, Ismaïl

Contemporary

Harvill Press

The File on H

Vintage Books

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)

Three-Arched Bridge

Literary

It's 28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since. 28 June 1989, the Serb Leader Slobodan Milosevic launches his campaign for a fresh massacre of the Albanians, the majority population of Kosovo. In three short narratives, Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.

Three Elegies for Kosovo

Genre Fiction

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

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

Books by Kadaré, Ismaïl

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

Broken April

The File on H

General of the Dead Army

The Palace Of Dreams (Vintage Classics)

Three-Arched Bridge

Three Elegies for Kosovo

The Three-Arched Bridge

The Pyramid

The Successor

The Successor