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The Notebook Trilogy
  • Published: 5 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837312436
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448
Categories:

The Notebook Trilogy

Formats & editions
Paperback
9 Feb 2027
EBook
5 Nov 2026
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The internationally acclaimed The Notebook Trilogy has long been hailed a masterpiece and across the world, and is now available in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time

Sent to a remote village to live with their grandmother, twins Claus and Lucas devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to the ongoing horrors of war and living under a totalitarian regime. When their bond is tested, their collective ‘we’ shatters and the boys become isolated in different countries. Lucas is challenged to prove his identity and that of his missing brother, a defector to ‘the other side’.

Kristóf’s haunting and unforgettable masterpiece has been an international phenomenon ever since its first publication in French 40 years ago. Distilling the brutally fracturing effects of war and displacement onto identity and memory, and our need for stories in our search for unity and meaning, The Notebook Trilogy is stark fable of timeless relevance.
  • Published: 5 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837312436
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448
Categories:

About the author

Ágota Kristóf

Ágota Kristóf, born in Csikvánd, Hungary, in 1935, became an exile in French-speaking Switzerland in 1956. Working in a factory, she slowly learned French, the language of her adopted country. Her first novel The Notebook (1986), gained international recognition and was translated into more than thirty languages. It was followed by the sequels in the trilogy, The Proof (1988), and The Third Lie (1991). In 2004 Kristof published a memoir, The Illiterate, about her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956, her learning a new language as a refugee, and writing in this new ‘alien’ language, French. She also wrote plays and further novels. She died in 2011.
Ágo

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Praise for The Notebook Trilogy

A book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... awoke in me a cold and cruel passion

Slavoj Zizek

A dark study of the human psyche

The New York Times Book Review

A great book, in the absolute

TLS

A haunting, harrowing tale that lingers in the imagination long after you’ve turned the last page

The Washington Post

A stunning, brutal and beautifully written (and translated) book

George Szirtes

An almost lyrical intensity . . . fierce and disturbing

The New York Times

Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive

Eimear McBride

Brutal, laconic, haunting … it argues for the necessity of stories in the midst of tragedy

Ocean Vuong

Closing this chillingly unsentimental novel, I felt that it had contrived to say absolutely everything about the Second World War and its aftermath in Central Europe

Sunday Times

Every now and again you read a book by an unknown author and you know immediately that you are in the company of greatness . . . The utter simplicity of the style, the clarity, the unflinching gaze at a world far removed from any I had experienced and yet curiously familiar … and the deep humanity underlying it all, took my breath away

Gabriel Josipovici

Kristóf’s sentences are like . . . skeletons, commemorations of indescribable sadness that have been meticulously scrubbed of gore and gristle

New Yorker