Liquidation

Description

A stunning novel from the Nobel prize Laureate in Literature; the story of a Hungarian writer whose death forces his circle of friends to confront their own terrible moment in history. 'Liquidation, suspenseful and bleakly comic, reads like a treatise on the mystery of the end of life and the mystery of suicide... A compelling if deeply unsettling work' Independent Kingbitter, an editor at a failing publishing house, believes himself to have been the closest friend of B., a celebrated writer and Auschwitz survivor, who recently committed suicide. Amongst the papers B. has left him, Kingbitter finds a play entitled Liquidation that uncannily predicts the behaviour of B.'s ex-wife, his mistress and Kingbitter himself. As he obsessively reads and rereads the play, Kingbitter becomes transfixed with the idea that buried within these papers is B.'s great novel- the book that will explain his relationship with Auschwitz.

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

A beautiful glimpse of the wide-open spaces of storytelling * Daily Telegraph * A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel, which, in this fine translation, reads as if it were written in this century, not the last * Sunday Times *