A Girl in Exile

Description

A stunning, deeply affecting portrait of life and love under surveillance, infused with myth, wry humour and the chilling absurdity of a paranoid regime. When a girl is found dead with a signed copy of Rudian Stefa's latest book in her possession, the author finds himself summoned for an interview by the Party Committee. Unable to guess what transgression he has committed Rudian goes fearfully to meet his interrogators. He has never met the girl in question but he remembers signing the book. As the influence of a paranoid regime steals up on him, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to the mysterious girl to whom he wrote the dedication - to Linda B.

Ismail Kadare 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, and the Neustadt Prize in 2020.

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 *