International Praise for The Siege:
"Extraordinary: an epic with the force of myth and the delicacy of a miniature…You could read The Siege every year for a lifetime and find something new each time. There seems no reason to refrain from calling this ideal collaboration between author and translator a masterpiece."
-The Sunday Telegraph
"Kadare's poker-faced sense of humor and eye for the characters' secret absurdities, tragic as well as comic, make the book more than a coded protest from a Cold War backwater. The urgent gestures toward something that's not quite said somehow make the story linger in the mind long after the regime in which The Siege was written went the way of the empire it dreams back to life."
-The Guardian
"Another masterpiece…[The Siege is] an original approach to an old story many times retold; a song sung in an eloquently expressive voice, both agelessly familiar and refreshingly new."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Composed with grace and economy throughout, it is as relevant now as it was nearly four decades ago…. Kadare's attention to detail is remarkable - he describes the tiniest detail…as if it is a symbol of timeless beauty."
-The Herald
"Kadare's fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny-his historical allegories point both to the grand themes and small details that make up daily life in a restrictive environment. But his books are more than just political statements-at his best he is a great writer, by any nation's standards."
-Financial Times
"Kadare, a Man Booker International Prize-winner and Nobel contender, crafts a story whose details add up to a glimpse into the soul of his own country."
-Publishers Weekly
"Drawing on Albanian history and folklore as well as the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Kadare weaves a resonant tapestry of war that evokes battlefield dramas ranging from The Iliad to today's headlines."
-Library Journal
"It is Kadare's greatest achievement to create individuals who are at the same time archetypes. The background is powerfully atmospheric: the bustle of the camp…is vividly rendered…. Technical details of undermining and siege engines are fascinating marvels of hideously misdirected ingenuity."
-Times Literary Supplement
"Battle scenes predominate, and are admirably vivid, the narrative swirling and bursting, matching the confusion of the action, its chaotic immediacy, violence happening before one realizes that it has."
-The Telegraph
Also by Ismail Kadare
The General of the Dead Army
The Wedding
Doruntine
The Concert
The Palace of Dreams
Three Elegies for Kosovo
Broken April
The File on H.
Albanian Spring
The Pyramid
The Three-Arched Bridge
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
Chronicle in Stone
The Successor
Agamemnon's Daughter
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