Ismail Kadare Books

From the moment that Gjorg's brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit: for the code of Kanun requires Gjorg to kill his brother's murderer and then in turn be hunted down. After shooting his brother's killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days' grace - not enough to see out the month of April.Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride's heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these 'civilised' strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta.

When it was first published in the author's native country, THE PALACE OF DREAMS was immediately banned. The novel revolves around a secret ministry whose task is not just to spy on its citizens, but to collect and interpret their dreams. An entire nation's unconscious is thus tapped and meticulously laid bare in the form of images and symbols of the dreaming mind.

Shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.

An early masterpiece from the inaugural winner of the Man Booker International Prize, introduced by James Wood

The narrative unfurls with the shifting intensity of a dream, enriched by unsettlingly surreal details... It is a brilliant examination of the way that authoritarian structures operate: Kafka on a grander political scale. Sunday Times

A bridge under construction in 14th Century Albania is secretly sabotaged by ferry men who are afraid of being made redundant. Officially they blame a prophecy that no bridge will stand over the river without human sacrifice to the water spirits. So the builders immure a villager and the bridge gets built. A Balkan parable by the author of The Pyramid.

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his country's dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission, and their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing. 'He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil' Independent on Sunday

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder (a 'new fangled' invention) in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers.

Sacrificed to further a father's blood-soaked career; sacrificed for the common good; sacrificed, then forgotten.

From the Man Booker International Prize winner comes a story of the great city of Gjirokaster and of a secret meeting that may have changed the face of Europe in the twentieth century