Fateless

Description

The powerful story of an adolescent's experience of Auschwitz by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, Imre Kertesz. 'While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer' Observer Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business - his final act before being sent to a labour camp. Two months later, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a 'permanent workplace'. This is the start of his journey to Auschwitz. On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of the barbarity - and beauty - he witnesses.

Imre Kertesz was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fateless, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Imre Kertesz died in Budapest in March 2016

Moving and numbing...a very great novel - Irish Times Remarkable...an original and chilling quality -New York Review of Books [T]his work...ought to stand beside Primo Levi's If This is a Man - The Times Extraordinary - Observer Should be savoured slowly . . . Only through exploring its subtlety and detail will the reader come to appreciate such an ornate and honest testimony to the human spirit * Washington Times *