Agamemnon's Daughter : A Novella and Stories

Translated by David Bellos

A searing story of love denied, then shattered under the chilling wheels of the state.

Now available in Australia for the first time, Agamemnon’s Daughter was written in Albania in the 1980s and smuggled into France a few pages at a time. This spellbinding tale of a thwarted lover’s odyssey through a single day reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds.

Ismail Kadare on writing in Communist Albania:

Dissent was not possible. You risked being shot. Not condemned, but shot for a word against the regime. A single word.
Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible…The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.
[I] revived old forms—parable, myth, fable, folk-tale, legend—packed them with allusion and metaphor, plundered the past.
Ancient literature was more than historic. It was mythological, which is deeper and more distant then history. A person, whether writing or reading, needs some degree of remoteness from particular events.

Praise for Agamemnon's Daughter:

‘Kadare often sailed close to the wind and many of his texts were banned. Some he smuggled out of the country as pages stuffed inside wine bottles…But his witty, sly, moving panorama of a universal history made manifest in Albania maintained a glimmer of hope that even in the worst of times, things can still be done with style and intelligence. Kadare’s writing is a striking reminder that great literature does not depend on circumstances, but overcomes them.’

Independent

'Kadare's political courage made him a hero; his sense of irony and his powerful command of narrative are what make hime a writer, the George Orwell of an Iron Curtain nightmare that is gone but not forgotten.'

Boston Globe

'A magnificent achievement.'

Los Angeles Times

'The words of Ismail Kadare bloom on the page of his new book, his dexterous plots and confident narrative standing unasailable.'

San Francisco Chronicle