Ismail Kadare Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Castle (1970)
  2. Chronicle in Stone (1971)
  3. Broken April (1980)
  4. The File on H. (1981)
  5. Doruntine (1988)
  6. The Pyramid (1992)
  7. The Palace of Dreams (1993)
  8. The Concert (1994)
  9. Three Arched Bridge (1994)
  10. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2002)
  11. The Successor (2003)
  12. The Siege (2008)
  13. The Ghost Rider (2010)
  14. The Accident (2010)
  15. The Fall of the Stone City (2012)
  16. The Succesor (2013)
  17. Twilight of the Eastern Gods (2014)
  18. A Girl in Exile (2016)
  19. The Traitor’s Niche (2017)

Collections

  1. Elegy for Kosovo (2000)
  2. Three Elegies for Kosovo (2005)
  3. Agamemnon’s Daughter (2006)

Non fiction

  1. The General of the Dead Army (1963)
  2. Albanian Spring (1994)
  3. The Doll (2020)

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Ismail Kadare Books Overview

The Castle

An English translation of the second work by this well respected author. A story of Albania’s struggle against the Ottoman Turks, involving the siege of a medieval Albanian fortress by the Turks in the 15th century, and the defeat of the Turks by Skenderbeg. Born and raised in southern Albania, Kadare grew up during the years of World War II, witnessing the occupation of his home country by fascist Italy, Na*zi Germany, and the Soviet Union. He studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana, Albania, and at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. Famous as a writer in Albania, he has grown to become well known in the world as well published in up to forty languages. In the last few years he has been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Chronicle in Stone

Masterful in its simplicity, Chronicle in Stone is a touching coming of age story and a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy’s eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty as well as the simple pleasures of life. Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things, but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy’s story are tantalizing fragments of the city’s history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges.

Broken April

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.

The File on H.

In the mid 1930s, two young American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic, with one of the world’s first tape recorders in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works such as The Iliad and The Odyssey without ever writing them down. Their research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans and, mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under surveillance. Research and intrigue proceed apace, until a Serbian monk plots a violent end to their project.

Doruntine


a magical parable of love, death and the power of familial bonds. Stephen Salisbury, New York Times Book Review

The Pyramid

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 Palace of Dreams

A sinister totalitarian ministry called The Palace of Dreams recruits Mark Alem to sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of the people in the empire, seeking the ”master dreams” that give clues to the empire’s destiny.

The Concert

A group of Albanian friends are torn apart by the political turmoil of the mid 1970s, as the nation’s diplomatic ties with China begin to unravel, and their personal entanglements follow suit in the face of governmental insecurity.

Three Arched Bridge

The year: 1377. The place: the Balkan peninsula. Here in Ismail Kadare’s novel, The Three Arched Bridge, an Albanian monk chronicles the events surrounding the construction of a bridge across a great river known as Ujana e Keqe, or ‘Wicked Waters.’ If successful in their endeavor, the bridge builders will challenge a monopoly on water transportation known simply as ‘Boats and Rafts.’ The story itself parallels developments in modern day Eastern Europe, with the bridge emblematic of a disintegrating economic and political order: just as mysterious cracks in the span’s masonry endanger the structure and cast the local community into a morass of uncertainty, superstition, and murder, so the fast changing conditions in the 14th century Balkan peninsula threaten to overwhelm the stability of life there. Dark as the story itself is, Mr. Kadare’s prose, skillfully translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, is elegant, witty, and deft. And with so many twists and turns in its carefully constructed plot, this political parable keeps the reader’s interest to the very end.

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

In a town at the foot of the northern Highlands, life goes on as always, but people are in a state of shock: a bank has been robbed, a sure sign of the Westernization of this backward Balkan land. Meanwhile, other strange events such as the marriage of a girl and a snake confirm that ancient legends still prevail. People are flocking from far and wide to search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, said to house records of crimes they may have committed. Some even claim the ghosts of former dictators Hoxha, Brezhnev, and Ulbricht not to mention Oedipus have been seen there…
. Against this backdrop, a simple and sensual love story between a painter and a girl stands out as light against dark.

The Successor

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 M rquez, Canetti, and Auster. From the Hardcover edition.

The Siege

From Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize a novelist in the class of Coetzee, Pamuk, M rquez, and Rushdie the stunning new translation of one of his major works. In the early fifteenth century, as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed. They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable. Soon enough, dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel. Brightly coloured banners, hastily constructed minarets, and tens of thousands of men fill the plain below. From this moment on, the world is waiting to hear that the fortress has fallen. The Siege tells the enthralling story of the weeks and months that follow of the exhilaration and despair of the battlefield, the constantly shifting strategies of war, and those whose lives are held in the balance, from the Pasha himself to the artillerymen, astrologer, blind poet, and harem of women who accompany him.’Believe me,’ the general said. ‘I ve taken part in many sieges but this,’ he waved towards the castle walls, ‘is where the most fearful carnage of our times will take place. And you surely know as well as I do that great massacres always give birth to great books. You really do have an opportunity to write a thundering chronicle redolent with pitch and blood, and it will be utterly different from the graceful whines composed at the fireside by squealers who never went to war.’Brilliantly vivid, as insightful as it is compelling, The Siege is an unforgettable account of the clash of two great civilisations, and a portrait of war that will resonate across the centuries.

The Ghost Rider

A classic medieval mystery from the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, a writer in the class of Atwood, Coetzee, Marquez, and Rushdie An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is The Ghost Rider?

The Accident

From Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare comes a dizzying psychological thriller of twisted passions, dual identities, and political subterfuge. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the war in the Balkans,The Accidentclosely documents an affair between two young lovers. On a rainy morning in Vienna, a taxi pulls onto the autobahn only to crash into the median barrier moments later, hurling its two passengers a man and a woman from the backseat as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control; he only says that the mysterious couple seemed to be about to kiss. As the investigation into their deaths deepens, a lonely researcher will uncover a mutually destructive relationship that blurs the line between fact and fiction, fear and desire, and love and fixation over the course of twelve years. An alluring mixture of vivid hallucination and cold reality,The Accidentis a fever dream of a novel that marks a bold and fascinating departure from Kadare’s previous work.

Elegy for Kosovo

‘ June 28, 1389: Six hundred years before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic called for the repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo, there took place, on the Field of the Blackbirds, a battle shrouded in legend. A coalition of Serbs, Albanian Catholics, Bosnians, and Rumanians confronted and fell to the invading Ottoman army of Sultan Murad. The battle established the Muslim foothold in Europe and became a centerpiece of Serbian nationalist ideology, justifying the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars that the world witnessed with horror at the end of the last century. In this eloquent and timely reflection on war, memory, and the destiny of two peoples, Ismail Kadare explores in fiction the legend and the consequences of that defeat. Elegy for Kosovo is a heartfelt yet clear eyed lament for a land riven by hatreds as old as the Homeric epics and as young as the latest news broadcast.’

Three Elegies for Kosovo

Part fiction, part history, these three short narratives focus on the original Battle of Kosovo. In them Ismail Kadare, an Albanian patriot but one who has escaped from a narrow nationalism has borne witness to the lost nobility of the Balkan peoples and issued a call for its restoration.

Agamemnon’s Daughter

In this spellbinding novel, written in Albania and smuggled into France a few pages at a time in the 1980s, Ismail Kadare denounces with rare force the machinery of a dictatorial regime, drawing us back to the ancient roots of tyranny in Western Civilization. During the waning years of Communism, a young worker for the Albanian state controlled media agency narrates the story of his ill fated love for the daughter of a high ranking official. When he witness the ghostly image of Agamemnon the Ancient Greek king who sacrificed his own daughter for reasons of State on the reviewing stand during a May Day celebration, he begins to suspect the full catastrophe of his devotion. Also included are ‘The Blinding Order,’ a parable of the Ottoman Empire about the uses of terror in authoritarian regimes, and ‘The Great Wall,’ a chilling duet between a Chinese official and a soldier in the invading army of the Tamerlane.

The General of the Dead Army

Twenty years after World War II, an Italian general is sent to Albania to recover the remains of his country’s fallen soldiers. Accompanied by a quarrelsome priest, the general digs up battlefields full of unmarked graveyards, checking teeth and dog tags, assembling a dead army in pine box uniforms. Battling the elements and the growing hostility of the locals, the general finds that what he sees as a mission of mercy, they see as an opportunity for revenge against their former conquerors. Then, in a terrible crescendo, he is made to answer for the crimes of his country and all others that have invaded this land of eagles. But nothing, not his words nor his actions, can change the past or make amends. Enthralling and poignant, The General of the Dead Army beautifully elegizes all those sent abroad to die in battle.

Albanian Spring

Ismail Kadare, Albania’s foremost literary figure, went into self imposed exile to France in October 1990. The ‘Albanian Spring‘ had proved no more substantial than the ‘Prague Spring’ many years earlier. Exhaulted and revered under the regime of Enver Hoxha, Karare, nontheless, was pleased to witness the changes taking place in Eastern Europe, and felt that at last true openness and democracy would come to Albania. His attempts to promote it and his ultimate recognition that it would not happen is the basis of this book. Several times short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Ismail Kadare has had several of his books translated into English, including ‘Chronicle in Stone’, ‘Doruntine’, ‘Broken April’ and ‘The Three Arched Bridge’.

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