Globe Pequot / Lyons Press
Pages: 192
Trim: 5½ x 8¾
978-1-4930-5517-3 • Paperback • August 2020 • $16.95 • (£12.95)
978-1-4616-6326-3 • eBook • June 1998 • $13.99 • (£10.95)
Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Gjirokaster near the Greek border, is Albania’s best-known poet and novelist. He has lived in France since 1990, following his decision to seek asylum. From 1986, under the Communist regime, Mr. Kadare’s work was smuggled out of Albania by his French publisher, Éditions Fayard, and stored in safe keeping for later publication. Translations of his novels have since been published in more than forty countries. Mr. Kadare is the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize 2005 and won the Neustadt International Prize for 2020. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 2019.
David Bellos was educated at Oxford and teaches French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he also directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. He has written biographies of Georges Perec and Jacques Tati, and an introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? He has translated numerous authors from French (Perec, Vargas, Kadare, Simenon, Antelme, Fournel) and offers a new understanding of the extraordinary life and work of Romain Gary in Romain Gary A Tall Story. His latest book is a study of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables.
Written with masterly simplicity in a bardic style....With Broken April, Mr. Kadare comes to the forefront as a major international novelist.
— The New York Times
…Powerful, old-fashioned fiction almost Dostoevskian in its dark vision.
— Kirkus
One of contemporary fiction's greatest prose lyricists.
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
In Broken April, Kadare achieves a precise and delicate balance of wonder and horror, simplicity and irony....[Kadare] is an accomplished storyteller with a keen sense of literary history.
— The Christian Science Monitor
Kadare's voice is a voice unlike any other in contemporary fiction. The Nobel can't come a moment too soon.
— Kirkus
A major international novelist.
— Herbert Mitgang; The New York Times
One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language.
— The Wall Street Journal
Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture—its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.
— Professor John Carey, Committee Chair, Man Booker International Prize 2005
Ismail Kadare's fiction has been compared with that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Certainly he induces that same ironic double-take in his readers, by means of the child's magical view of life that is larger than most adults realize
— Leonie Caldecott; The New York Times
Writing like this is hard to stop quoting, it is musical not only in rhythms, but in its most elemental perceptions.
— Nation
Albania's most valuable literary export: the novels of Ismail Kadare.
— Ken Kalfus; Village Voice Literary Supplement
Albania's Kadare is probably the premier writer of fiction to have emerged from the Balkan countries since Bosnian Nobel-winning novelist Ivo Andric.
— Kirkus
A great writer.
— Booklist
Kadare's prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
— Los Angeles Times