A stunning novel from the Nobel prize Laureate in Literature; the story of a Hungarian writer whose death forces his circle of friends to confront their own terrible moment in history.
‘Liquidation, suspenseful and bleakly comic, reads like a treatise on the mystery of the end of life and the mystery of suicide… A compelling if deeply unsettling work’ Independent
Kingbitter, an editor at a failing publishing house, believes himself to have been the closest friend of B., a celebrated writer and Auschwitz survivor, who recently committed suicide. Amongst the papers B. has left him, Kingbitter finds a play entitled Liquidation that uncannily predicts the behaviour of B.'s ex-wife, his mistress and Kingbitter himself. As he obsessively reads and rereads the play, Kingbitter becomes transfixed with the idea that buried within these papers is B.'s great novel: the book that will explain his relationship with Auschwitz.
“A beautiful glimpse of the wide-open spaces of storytelling”
Daily Telegraph
“A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel, which, in this fine translation, reads as if it were written in this century, not the last”
Sunday Times