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Books

A Girl in Exile: Ismail Kadare’s novel is full of absence

Kadare writes hauntingly about loss and omission— the girl never met, the book never written, the love never found

26 March 2016

9:00 AM

26 March 2016

9:00 AM

A Girl in Exile Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson

Harvill Secker, pp.186, £16.99, ISBN: 9781846558467

My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts the life of an artist favoured by a brutally oppressive regime, this time written by one who was there. Ismail Kadare survived the rule of that isolationist tyrant Enver Hoxha.

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