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  • Published: 15 December 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099518266
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $29.99

General Of The Dead Army



Albania: once a battlefield, now a charnel-house. And yet, life goes on . . .This sweeping epic of post-war Albania was Kadare's first novel.

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his country's dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission, and their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing.

  • Published: 15 December 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099518266
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2015.

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Praise for General Of The Dead Army

A novelist of dazzling mastery

Paul Binding, Independent

He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil

Independent on Sunday

Astonishing...his finest work

Azar Nafisi, Man Booker judge and author of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran', Guardian

With its metonymic realism and fidelity to its characters, The General of the Dead Army reminds us why his work is so valued

New Statesman

Literary gold dust - haunting, bleakly comedic and ultimately horrific

The Times