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ABOUT THIS BOOK

PUBLISHER: Canongate Books

FORMAT: Paperback

ISBN: 9781841958873

RRP: £8.99

PAGES: 224

PUBLICATION DATE:
January 25, 2007

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The Successor

Ismail Kadare

David Bellos

The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14. Did he kill himself or was he murdered? This question slices through Ismail Kadare’s masterful psychological thriller. As the state insists that the future leader died by his own hand, the rest of the world begins to have doubts. As the tension builds and rumours escalate, Kadare draws us into a nightmarish world controlled by rules no one understands, blending dream and reality to produce a mystery and a thriller that seduces and surprises up to the last page.

Reviews of The Successor

"A writer who maps a whole culture – its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer." JOHN CAREY "He has been compared with Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil." INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY"

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Ismail Kadare

ISMAIL KADARE was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster, in the south of Albania. He studied in Tirana and Moscow, returning to Albania in 1960 after the country broke ties with the Soviet Union. Translations of his novels have since been published in more than forty countries, and in 2005 he became the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize. DAVID BELLOS, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, is a writer and translator who has translated five of Kadare’s novels and was chosen by Kadare to be the winner of the Translator’s Man Booker International Prize.