TheSuccessor

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, Director of the Program in Translation at Princeton University, is also the translator of Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual and a winner of the Goncourt Prize for biography. He has translated seven of Ismail Kadare's novels, and in 2005 was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for his translations of Kadare's work.

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.

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. Tension builds and rumours escalate, while 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.

"Combines all the readability of a crime novel with the innovatory adventurousness of a work created by a writer who never repeats others, much less himself ... The Successor [is] a brilliant autopsy on the corpse of a ghastly regime."
Francis King, Spectator

Translated by David Bellos

Tyranny in Tirana, a novel from the inaugural Man Booker International Prize winner based on the final days of Enver Hoxha.Brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania. The Successor provides a mesmerically readable parable about the abuse of state power.One of the most compelling novelists now writing.Suffused with the power of thought and feeling. Above all, Kadare creates a haunting sense of the absurd.From his youthful obsessions with Shakespeare and Homer, Kadare has retained not just a love of mystery and wit and a facility for clear, bleak language, but a sense of the text's own mystery and the impossibility of fully penetrating it... There is certainly nothing run-of-the-mill about Kadare's biting parable of tyranny.