Agamemnon's Daughter
Ismail Kadare
Available as eBook
Sacrificed to further a father’s blood-soaked career; sacrificed for the common good; sacrificed, then forgotten.
In his compelling prequel to The Successor, Kadare draws us into a land deprived of choice, a country under a reign of terror. The spellbinding Agamemnon’s Daughter was written in Albania in the 1980s and smuggled into France a few pages at a time. It reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds.
From the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize comes a searing story of love denied, then shattered under the chilling wheels of the state. Through the impeccably crafted, incisive tale of a thwarted lover’s odyssey through a single day, we are given a true sense of how hard it can be to remain human in a world ruled by fear and suspicion.
“Kadare brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania … a mesmerically readable parable about the abuse of state power”
observer
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“Suffused with the power of thought and feeling … Above all, Kadare creates a haunting sense of the absurd”
sunday Times
“Dream and reality melt together, as in Kafka, making it difficult to identify where the nightmares really begin”
times
Ismail Kadare
ISMAIL KADARE was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster, in the south of Albania. His first novel, The General of the Dead Army, established him as a respected writer, and translations of his novels have since been published in more than forty countries. In 2005 he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize.
DAVID BELLOS, a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, has translated five of Kadare’s novels and was awarded the Translator’s Man Booker International Prize in 2005