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  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407072227
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Fateless




The powerful story of an adolescent's experience of Auschwitz by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, Imre Kertész.

'While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer' Observer

Gyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business - his final act before being sent to a labour camp. Two months later, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a 'permanent workplace'. This is the start of his journey to Auschwitz.

On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of the barbarity - and beauty - he witnesses.

  • Published: 1 September 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407072227
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Imre Kertesz

Imre Kertész was born in 1929 in Budapest. As a youth, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and later in Buchenwald. He worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fateless, his first novel, in 1975. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Imre Kertész died in Budapest in March 2016

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Praise for Fateless

While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality for those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer

Susannah Steven, Observer, Books of the Week

Moving and numbing...a very great novel - Irish Times

Remarkable...an original and chilling quality -New York Review of Books

[T]his work...ought to stand beside Primo Levi's If This is a Man - The Times

Extraordinary - Observer

[The] crisp new translation still has an extraordinary power to shock

Elena Seymenliyska, Guardian

Should be savoured slowly . . . Only through exploring its subtlety and detail will the reader come to appreciate such an ornate and honest testimony to the human spirit

Washington Times

A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel

Sunday Times