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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.

About the Author: Ismail Kadare is acclaimed worldwide as one of the most important writers of our time. He lives in Paris and Tirana.

The year is 2035. After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivors—the last of humanity—are trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell.

Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Six—children who were born deformed or sterile and raised in the Shell. As, one by one, the survivors grow sick and die, Pete and the Six struggle to put aside their anger at the alien Tesslies in order to find the means to rebuild the earth together. Their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool.

Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings. Suddenly her predictive algorithms begin to reveal more than just criminal activity. As she begins to realize her role in the impending catastrophe, simultaneously affecting the Earth and the Shell, Julie closes in on the truth. She and Pete are converging in time upon the future of humanity—a future which might never unfold.

Weaving three consecutive time lines to unravel both the mystery of the Earth’s destruction and the key to its salvation, this taut post-apocalyptic thriller offers a topical plot with a satisfying twist.

June 28, 1389: six hundred years before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic called for a new massacre 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 were defeated by the Ottoman army of Sultan Murad. This battle became the centerpiece of Serbian nationalist ideology, justifying the campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Albanian Kosovars. In three stories resonant with mystery, Ismail Kadare explores the legend and the consequences of that defeat.

— A heartfelt and yet clear-eyed lament for a land riven by hatreds as old as the Homeric epics and as young as the latest news broadcast.

"Ismail Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness." — Los Angeles Times

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?

From Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize — a novelist in the class of Coetzee, Pamuk, Marquez, 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.

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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 Márquez, Canetti, and Auster.

Winner of the 2009 Brage Prize, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in "Morgenbladet," the 2010 P2 Listeners' Prize, and the 2004 Norwegian Critics' Prize and nominated for the 2010 Nordic Council Literary Prize.

"No one in his generation equals Knausgaard."-"Dagens Naeringsliv"

"A tremendous piece of literature."-"Politiken" (Denmark)

"To the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day or another, this thumping motion shuts down of its own accord. The changes of these first hours happen so slowly and are performed with such an inevitability that there is almost a touch of ritual about them, as if life capitulates according to set rules, a kind of gentleman's agreement."

Almost ten years have passed since Karl O. Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. He is now embarking on his third novel while haunted by self-doubt. Knausgaard breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way. Knausgaard probes into his past, dissecting struggles-great and small-with great candor and vitality. Articulating universal dilemmas, this Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.

Karl O. Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel "Out of This World" won the Norwegian Critics' Prize and his "A Time for Everything" was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize.

Having left his first wife, Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, Sweden, where he leads a solitary existence. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply.

"Intense and vital. . Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties. . The need for totality. . brings superb, lingering, celestial passages. . He wants us to inhabit he ordinariness of life, which is sometimes vivid, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone. . The concluding sentences of the book are placid, plain, achieved. They have what Walter Benjamin called 'the epic side of truth, wisdom.'" — James Wood,

"Ruthless beauty." —

"This first installment of an epic quest should restore jaded readers to life." —

"Between Proust and the woods. Like granite; precise and forceful. More real than reality." — (Italy)

Desconocido<

An autobiographical story of childhood and family from the international sensation and bestseller, Karl Ove Knausgaard. A family of four — mother, father and two boys — move to Sorland, to a new house on a new estate. It is the early 1970s, the children are small, the parents young and the future open. But at some point that future happens to them; at some point the future closes. The third book of the "My Struggle" cycle is set in a world where children and adults live parallel lives, ones that never meet. With insight and honesty, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes of a child''s growing self-awareness, of how events of the past impact on the present, and of the desire for other ways of living and other worlds within what we know.<