The Succesor: A Novel

By Ismail Kadare

Based on true events in Albania, this “whodunit tragicomedy about a Communist loyalist’s death” explores the psychology of tyranny (The New York Times Book Review).



A Financial Times Best Fiction Selection and a New York Times Notable Book

Written by a Man Booker International Prize winner and based on the sudden, suspicious death of Mehmet Shehu, who’d been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha in the early 1980s, The Successor is simultaneously a mystery, a historical novel informed partly by the author’s conversations with the real-life Mehmet Shehu’s son, and “a mesmerically readable parable about the abuse of state power” (The Guardian).

“Evokes extremely well the hyperattentiveness produced by a totalitarian regime. . . . Intelligent, rich and fascinating.” —The Globe and Mail

“An emotional roller-coaster ride.” —The Winnipeg Free Press

“[His body of work] adds up to a portrait of an imaginary land—Kadaria, some have called it—with a single, central topic: how to remain human in a world ruled by fear and suspicion.” —The Independent

“Gripping. . . . It invites us, dares us even, to identify not only with the oppressed or the nobly defiant, but also with those whom force of circumstance has turned into cogs in the machinery of oppression. In doing so it obliges us to look for the sources of terror in our own psyche rather than that of some conveniently ghoulish Other (though it acknowledges the existence of these too).” —The Guardian

“Partakes of both fiction and fable, refracted history and bad dream . . . like the very best books, [it] demands that ultimate tribute from the audience: a second reading.” —Los Angeles Times

“As Kadare explores the perspectives of those caught in the successor’s orbit, past and present, it becomes apparent that he is investigating not only the fate of a man, but the nature of truth when the symbol one becomes outweighs the human one is . . . Kadare stands with Orwell, Kafka, Kundera and Solzhenitsyn as a major chronicler of oppression.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781611459982

Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best known novelist, whose name is mentioned annually in discussions of the Nobel Prize. He won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005; in 2009 he received the Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, Spain’s most prestigious literary award, and in 2015 he won the Jerusalem Prize. In 2016 he was named a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur. James Wood has written of his work, "Kadare is inevitably likened to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second. He is a compellingly ironic storyteller because he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality." His last book to be published in English, The Traitor’s Niche, was nominated for the Man Booker International.