The Traitor's Niche

The novel is a hymn to language, something that, as Ottoman bureaucrats intent on obliterating it instinctively know, and as Kadare’s novels prove, is not easily silenced

Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

An extraordinary and complex novel whose time has come...40 years after its initial publication [in Albanian]

Herald

Although on the surface this is a deeply compelling historical novel, its scope is wider. At heart, what Kadare seeks to demonstrate is the terrible nature of a world in which every human element is suborned to the state... Kadare well deserves his growing European audience.

Daily Telegraph

Kadare has said that he believes "dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible". The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship and this extraordinary novel, though tempered and surreal, is an unquestionably defiant one.

Robert Eustace, Daily Telegraph

The narrative unfurls with the shifting intensity of a dream, enriched by unsettlingly surreal details... It is a brilliant examination of the way that authoritarian structures operate: Kafka on a grander political scale.

Sunday Times

In John Hodgson’s lucid translation, The Traitor’s Niche is absorbing from start to finish. Kadare’s allegorical burlesque has rarely been so trenchant.

Spectator

Kadare [writes] with a sense of irony and a dark humour that often rise to the heights of absurdity, even when describing the most extreme situations.

Judith Vidal-Hall, Literary Review

bewitching novel

Daily Telegraph Best Books for Summer 2017

A wonderful exploration of European and Ottoman history that is not easily put down once opened. The examination of imperial politics and people’s desire for independence is riveting and imaginative

Pól Ó Muirí, Tablet

Bewitching.

Daily Telegraph