As Spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers, unknown under the tyrannical ancient regime, strike up the National Bank. The ghastly Kanun, regulator of medieval Albania's blood vendettas, is dr

Mehmet Shehu was the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. So sure was the world that he was next in line, he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. But, did he commit suicide or was he murdered? Thi

600 years ago a Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians was defeated by an Ottoman army. Part fiction, part history, this book comprises three short narratives focusing on the original Battle of Kosovo.

Sacrificed to further a father's blood-soaked career; sacrificed for the common good; sacrificed, then forgotten. In his compelling prequel to "The Successor", Kadare draws us into a land deprived of choice, a country under a reign of terror. Published here in English for the first time, the spellbinding "Agamemnon's Daughter", written in Albania in the 1980s and smuggled into France a few pages at a time, reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds. From the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize comes a searing story of love...

From the moment that Gjorg's brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit: for the Kanun, the code of the blood feud that operates in the Albanian mountains, requires Gjorg to kill his brother's murderer and then in turn to become an outcast to be hunted down by the new victim's family.

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer's epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. The two dedicated scholars realise only too late that they have stumbled over an ants' nest.

An Italian general, sent by his government to Albania to repatriate the remains of Italian troops, meets a German general engaged on an identical mission, and their conversations bring into the open their horror and guilt

In the tradition of George Orwell's 1984, Albania's leading writer creates a disturbing vision of unrestraned totalitarianism and the impact it has on those who exist under its shadow.

It's the 1970s and cracks are starting to appear in the alliance between China and its Communist cohort Albania. When an Albanian steps on the foot of a Chinese diplomat the tension cranks up - couriers between Tirana and Beijing carry annotated x-rays of the foot back and forth.

When the new Egyptian Pharaoh decrees that he does not want a pyramid built in his honour his advisers are aghast. It is their firm belief that peace and prosperity only make the people more difficult to control - they must be kept under the whip.