Praise for A Girl in Exile
A New York Times Book Review's Editors' Choice
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 by the Chicago Review of Books and The Millions
1 of 19 Translated Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer (Signature Reads)
Ismail Kadare's readers are astonished every year when the Nobel committee overlooks him . . . A Girl in Exile, published in Albanian in 2009, may rekindle the worldwide hopes. -The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
A Girl in Exile is erotic, paranoiac and lightly fantastical. -The Wall Street Journal
Kadare's mellifluous fever dream is a portrait of madness: the madness of the Stalinist state and the madness of men and women in the clamp of the state's machinations . . . At a time when parts of the world are indulging nostalgia for communism, Kadare's novel confronts the infuriating impossibility of art in an autocratic, anti-individualist system. -The Washington Post
A Girl in Exile is the gripping account of a playwright's tragic struggle with the effects of his creative work, as understood through political upheaval, narrative interchangeability, and a magnetic relationship . . . Beautifully, the text addresses the cruelties of dictatorship. -Los Angeles Review of Books
While common sense says that no artist can overhaul a country's literature singlehandedly, Kadare has done so . . . A Girl in Exile is the work of a historic talent who is still at the peak of his power. It confirms Kadare to be the best writer at work today who remembers-almost aggressively so, refusing to forget-European totalitarianism. Kadare tackles Albania's specific strangeness with a ferocious rigor that would feel scientific if it were not for the haunted, haunting humans he writes into being. -New Republic
Set among the bureaucratic machinery of Albania's dictatorship, this compelling novel evokes the paranoid nature of life and love under surveillance. -Chicago Review of Books, The Most Anticipated Fiction Books of 2018
Kadare structures the novel like a psychological detective yarn, but one with some serious existential heft . . . A strong study of the ease and banality of human duplicity. -The Millions, Most Anticipated: The Great 2018 Book Preview
Powerful, empathetic, at times harrowing . . . executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness . . . A chilling, humane and strangely beautiful work. -Independent
A brilliant novel that captures the horrors of a totalitarian regime. -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make-as Kadare himself had to do. -John Banville, Financial Times
The literature Kadare has produced in the face of obstacles lesser writers would find insuperable, is, genuinely, of world significance . . . Invites comparison with Milan Kundera's recent satire on Stalinism, The Festival of Insignificance. Both writers are favourites, year-in, year-out for the Nobel prize. Kadare will not damage his prospects with A Girl in Exile. -John Sutherland, The Times
Melodrama, tragedy and myth illuminate the relationship between individual and state in a fine novel from the great Albanian writer. -Guardian
Kadare is frequently mentioned as a Nobel contender, and his chances should only be enhanced by this odd and powerful novel. -Booklist
Myth and dream, memory and repression, all converge as the novel illuminates the essence of art in totalitarian Albania. An author respected throughout Europe should reach a wider American readership with this subversive novel. -Kirkus Reviews
The novel effectively conveys the era's drabness and repression, providing a timely sense of the constraints imposed by authoritarian regimes . . . A good treatment of repressive politics. -Library Journal
Comparisons to Kafka are inevitable, but there's also some Joseph Heller here. Kadare successfully renders Big Brother . . . A poignant narrative about exile. -Publishers Weekly
Ismail Kadare is one of the most lauded writers-in-translation in the English language, certainly one of Europe's most important writers, and virtually the singular representative of Albanian culture to the anglophone world . . . The novel is by turns a probing exploration of the strict censures on everyday life-from which coffee shop one drinks at to the friends and lovers one has and the art one makes-under a totalitarian regime, and by turns epic in its connections among the present of life under Hoxha in the 1980s and the ancient past of Western mythology and history. -World Literature Today
[Kadare] captures the paranoid nature of life under constant surveillance . . . and produces an ironic masterpiece. -Daily Mail
Filled with striking images and conceits . . . a powerful Kafkaesque charge . . . Kadare's imaginative intelligence ensures that it is chilling and intriguing. -Theo Tait, Sunday Times
Coolly ironic writing, which traverses ominous themes of censorship and state control . . . Kadare masterfully conjures an atmosphere of paranoia . . . This powerful novel is a monument. -Francesca Wade, Daily Telegraph
A Girl in Exile, from internationally acclaimed Albanian author and perennial Nobel Prize favorite Ismail Kadare, is a powerful and complex tale of life in the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' . . . [A] striking exploration of love, art, paranoia, and the limits of freedom in a totalitarian state. -Foreword Reviews
A Girl in Exile is both a timeless, ghostly love story, and a trenchant portrait of the artist in a totalitarian state. -4Columns
