The man who is next in line to be the leader of Albania is found shot dead in his bed. Was it suicide or was it murder?
Kadare, one of Europe's finest writers, reshapes recent Balkan history in this wry and witty political parable. Translated from the French by David Bellos.
Ismail Kadare was Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels, which include The Siege, The Successor, Chronicle in Stone and The Accident, have been published in more than forty countries. In 2005 he became the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2024.
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'Drawing on the richness of Albanian folklore and culture, Kadare tells his story through the voices of foreign intelligence agents, the Successor's daughter, his architect and the Minister for the Interior...producing a beautiful novel that is devastatingly universal but also imbued with an immutable sense of place.' Herald Sun
'Typical of Kadare's style, the book's narrative chemistry involves elements of myth, realism, folklore and fable, noir dreamscape and, at times, a gloss of surrealism. At one level, The Successor is a compelling Kafka-esque murder mystery. At another, it is a powerful allegory. In the latter regard, it will probably come to sit historically with the great 20th century evocations of totalitarianism nightmare terrain.' West Australian
'Kadare provides an enthralling passport to a world so foreign that at times his novels read like fantasy. But his books are far more than a den of pleasure for lovers of the exotic. They should be admired for the simple beauty of the prose, the intensity of the characterisations, the melancholy humour and the startling insights into human nature. He is sometimes described as remarkably universal, but this fails to recognise the complexity of both the author and his work - something his critics don't seem to understand.' Sydney Morning Herald
'From his youthful obsessions with Shakespeare and Homer, Kadare has retained not just a love of mystery and wit and 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 tyrrany.' Australian Financial Review
'this slender novel is part mystery, part thriller, part folklore, part serious historical fiction and part (a very large part) human comedy...The nice thing about Kadare is that you don't have to be either Albanian or intellectual to get his jokes. You don't even have to be an Albanian intellectual. Just keeping an interested eye on human extremes gives you access into this extreme world where murder is sung by the morning birds.' Helen Elliott, Weekend Australian
'Of Kadare's many great gifts, perhaps the most powerful is his ability to release the wraiths of that world while staying completely unruffled himself.' Independent on Sunday
'one of the great writers of our age' Scotsman
'The novel itself has precisely this quality of an ancient epic, with its startling imagery, its spare and beautiful language and the paradoxical power of Kadare's narrative to offer consolation, even when describing human pride and folly at its most bleakly destructive.' Sunday Telegraph
