Winner of the 2005 Man Booker International Prize

A powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.

Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? That is the burning question. The man who died by his own hand, or another's, was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator, Enver Hoxha. 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.

The Successor is simultaneously a mystery novel, a historical novel — based on actual events and buttressed by the author's private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu — and a psychological novel (How do you live when nothing is sure?). Vintage Kadare, The Successor seamlessly blends dream and reality, legendary past, and contemporary history.

"In 1981, on a December night, the designated successor to Albania's tyrannical 'Guide' died of a gunshot wound; the Albanian news reported it as a suicide, but rumors spoke of murder. The search for the story of that night spirals inward from the speculations of foreign intelligence analysts to the posthumous and fragmentary recollections of the successor himself. Through those, we see his daughter twice forced to abandon love that conflicted with her father's ambitions, and his son clapped in irons when doctrine required it. As Kadare explores the perspectives of those caught in the successor's orbit, past and present, it becomes apparent that he is investigating not only the fate of a man, but the nature of truth when the symbol one becomes outweighs the human one is. Kadare (Broken April) was awarded this year's Man Booker International Prize, given for a body of work rather than a single book; Arcade will re-release six other Kadare novels simultaneously with this one. The successor is based on Mehmet Shehu, destined to take over for dictator Enver Hoxha, and Kadare infuses his character with magical realist horror. Even in this clunky translation (from the French, as opposed to the original Albanian), Kadare stands with Orwell, Kafka, Kundera and Solzhenitsyn as a major chronicler of oppression." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Echoes of Kafka, Koestler, Camus and Orwell, in a master novelist's blackest and most bracing report yet from Communist Cloud-Cuckoo-Land." Kirkus Reviews

"Kadare's prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez." Los Angeles Times

"The shadow of the Kafka of The Castle and The Trial intersect the work of the Albanian novelist....Kadare is patently a world-class novelist." Boston Globe

Ismail Kadare, Albania's best-known poet and novelist, was born in 1936 in the mountain town of Gjirokaster, near the Greek border. He studied first at the University of Tirana and then in Moscow at the Gorky Institute for World Literature, a training school for writers and critics.

Returning home in 1960 after Albania severed relations with the Soviet Union, he worked as a journalist and also published his first poems. His first novel, The General of the Dead Army, made his name in Albania, and he was able to write full-time. He also edited Les Lettres Albanaises, a literary review published simultaneously in Albanian and French.

From 1986, under the Communist regime, Kadare's work was smuggled out of Albania by his French publisher, Éditions Fayard, and stored in safe keeping for later publication. Translations of his novels have been published in more than forty countries.

Kadare was granted political asylum in France in October 1990. Since 1995, he has divided his time between Paris and Tirana. In 1996, Kadare was elected to the seat of Karl Popper as foreign associate member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.