In spare, elegant prose, this modern novella recounts a troubled young man's flight from a judgmental village. Tobias, the illegitimate son of a prostitute and the local schoolmaster, finds peace with a factory job in the comfortable anonymity of a city. But his fragile respite is shattered by the appearance of Caroline, his boyhood love, who materializes with a husband and child in tow.

Yesterday

Literature & Fiction

Kristóf, Ágóta

World Literature

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Proof, The

Contemporary

Grove Weidenfeld

YESTERDAY

"Ágota Kristóf packs volumes into this elegant shape-shifting novella. It's simultaneously a sly exploration of storytelling and a powerful narrative about immigration and the pitfalls of starting over in a new country. Yesterday is a necessary and uncannily timely work by one of the unsung geniuses of contemporary literature." — Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters and Mira Corpora In spare, elegant prose, this modern novella recounts a troubled young man's flight from a judgmental village. Tobias, the illegitimate son of a prostitute and the local schoolmaster, finds peace with a factory job in the comfortable anonymity of a city. But his fragile respite is shattered by the appearance of Caroline, his boyhood love, who materializes with a husband and child in tow. This Dover edition marks Yesterday's first U.S. publication. Originally written in French by Hungarian author Ágota Kristóf, this haunting exploration of dislocation, the search for love and belonging, and life as an emigrant continues to resonate today. “Offers a lucid, poignant narrative of the struggle to find meaning in a world of 'unbearable waiting and . . . inexpressible silence.'" — Publishers Weekly "Many of Kristóf's stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail...have a cool, disturbing power — part documentary-like, part surreal — that is fierce and distinctive." — Kirkus Reviews "Ágota Kristóf tackles the theme of the double and the irreparable damage caused by severance from one's roots with a writing of rare sobriety and a spareness which, avoiding all superfluous sentimentality, goes right to the heart." — Marie Claire "Kristóf — most brilliant when she is blackest — plots a denouement that lies on the bleaker side of black. Read it, shudder, and utter thanks." — Scotland on Sunday

Yesterday (Dover Literature: Literary Fiction)

Literary

Dover Publications

Twin brothers, left with their evil grandmother at a time when war has blurred all distinctions between good and evil, learn to steal and kill in the name of survival and create their own loveless morality

Notebook

Random House Value Publishing

Twin brothers, left with their evil grandmother at a time when war has blurred all distinctions between good and evil, learn to steal and kill in the name of survival and create their own loveless morality

The Notebook (English and French Edition)

Grove Pr

Abandoned by his family during the war and then by his twin brother afterwards, Lucas tries to create a world of good within the police state his country has become, committing humanitarian acts for those on the margins of society

The Proof

In the third volume in a critically acclaimed trilogy that also includes The Proof and The Notebook, Claus lies dying in a prison in the town of his birth, reminiscing about the past and his missing twin and haunted by three lies that have profoundly affected his life.

The Third Lie

These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided "brothers" in much of Europe since World War II. Kristof's postmodern saga begins with The Notebook, in which the brothers are children, lost in a country torn apart by conflict, who must learn every trick of evil and cruelty merely to survive. In The Proof, Lucas is challenging to prove his own identity and the existence of his missing brother, a defector to the "other side." The Third Lie, which closes the trilogy, is a biting parable of Eastern and Western Europe today and a deep exploration into the nature of identity, storytelling, and the truths and untruths that lie at the heart of them all. "Stark and haunting." - The San Francisco Chronicle; "A vision of considerable depth and complexity, a powerful portrait of the nobility and perversity of the human heart." - The Christian Science Monitor.

The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

GROVE PRESS

Narrated in a series of stark, brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Ágota Kristóf's memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. Few writers can convey so much in so little space. Fierce yet almost pointedly flat and documentarian in tone, Kristóf portrays with a disturbing level of detail and directness an implacable message of loss: first, she is forced to learn Russian as a child (with the Soviet takeover of Hungary, Russian became obligatory at school); next, at age twenty-one, she finds herself required to learn French to survive: I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don't know it. I don't speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries, which I frequently consult. It is for this reason that I also call the French language an enemy language. There is a further reason, the most serious of all: this language is killing my mother tongue.

The Illiterate

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