The Accident is a destabilising mixture of vivid hallucination and cold reality, by the inaugural winner of the Man Booker International Prize.
On the autobahn in Vienna a taxi leaves the road and strikes the crash barrier, flinging its male and female passengers out of its back doors as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control, he only says that the mysterious couple in the back seat seemed to be about to kiss.
Set against the tumultuous backdrop and aftermath of the war in the Balkans, The Accident intimately documents an affair between two people caught in each other's webs. The investigation into their deaths uncovers a mutually destructive obsession that mirrors the conflicts of the region.
Ismail Kadare was Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels, which include The Siege, The Successor, Chronicle in Stone and The Accident, have been published in more than forty countries. In 2005 he became the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2024.
textpublishing.com.au
'The Accident cannot be put aside, but richly teases the reader to try to understand more of the meaning of what, exactly, the cab driver glimpsed in his rear-view mirror.' Independent
'Kadare is a novelist of the utmost subtlety' Scotsman
'the psychological atmosphere of tyranny, menace, uncertainty and a particular steely stoicism tinged with unhopeful defiance, is utterly characteristic, both of Kadare's individual voice and of the political regimes against which he has been accustomed to setting his strange, resonant narratives.' Sunday Telegraph
'[Kadare is] a modernist fabulist who by allegory and metaphor has nimbly laid bare the ironies and idiocies of recent Balkan experience...The Accident cannot be put aside, but richly teases the reader to try to understand more of the meaning of what, exactly, the cab driver glimpsed in his rear-view mirror.' Independent
'[Kadare's] elegant tales circle in the murky interface between the political, the personal and the psychotic...At heart, it is a romantic crime thriller that intrigues and illuminates...This is an important novel from one of Europe's grand masters. Its tale weaves you in whilst beguiling with its stylistic elegance. This is scintillating and inspiring writing.' Sunday Star Times
'Kadare is a master storyteller.' Weekend Australian
'Kadare writes with a plainness and understatement that concedes nothing to sentimentality.' NZ Weekend Herald
