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  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784872168
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $29.99

Liquidation



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.

  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784872168
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $29.99

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 Liquidation

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