Ágota Kristóf Book order

Agota Kristof's celebrated trilogy of novels exploring the after-effects of trauma and the nature of story-telling in the context of Nazi occupation and Soviet 'liberation' at the end of World War Two.

Narrated in a series of brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Kristof 's memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook.

"In her trademark spare, elegant prose, Ágota Kristóf explores the haunting world of exile and love. Tobias, the illegitimate son of a whore and the local schoolmaster, flees the pressures and judgments of his village to the soothing anonymity of life in the city and a job at a factory. But his carefully constructed world is shattered when Caroline, his childhood love, appears with her husband and young child. First translated into English in 1997, this Dover edition marks the first time Yesterday is published in the United States. Its treatment of dislocation, the search for love and belonging, and life as an emigrant resonate as strongly now as they did when this book first appeared"-- Provided by publisher

The child says, ‘That’s the only difference between the dead and those who go away, isn’t it? Those who aren’t dead will return.’ Lucas says, ‘But how do we know they aren’t dead when they’re away?’ ‘We can’t know.’Following on from The Notebook, which recounted the survival of twin brothers during war and occupation, The Proof and The Third Lie complete the trilogy of novels in which Kristof, as an emigré writer, forged wholly distinctive ways to treat the 20th-century European experience of war, occupation and separation.As the brothers Claus and Lucas, isolated in different countries, yearn for the seemingly impossible restoration of their lost connection, perspectives shift, memories diverge, identity becomes unstable. Written in Kristof ’s spare, direct style, the novels are an exploration both of the aftereffects of trauma and of the nature of story-telling.‘At the heart of this acrid trilogy, in all its studied understatement and lack of portentousness, we can feel the author’s slow-burning rage at the wholesale erasure of certainty and continuity in the world of her childhood and adolescence. At the same time we sense Kristof saturninely enjoying this annihilation for its imaginative potential. She will reassemble a shattered world on her own rigorous terms, and watch us wince and shudder in the process.’ – Jonathan Keates, Times Literary Supplement

Sent to a remote village for the duration of the war, two children devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to pain and sentiment. They steal, kill, blackmail and survive; others - the cobbler, the harelipped girl who craves love, the children's parents - are sucked into war's brutal maelstrom.