‘He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare’s is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil’ Independent on Sunday

As spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town of B-, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers strike the National Bank. The ghastly Kanun, regulator of medieval Albania’s blood vendettas, is dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And the ultra-explosive secrets of the state archives, rumoured to be buried in the area, are threatening to flood the entire nation. As Mark, an artist, struggles to complete portraits of his inextricably disturbed girlfriend and of the iceberg that struck the Titanic, he finds the dreamy, peaceful rhythms of his life turned upside down by ancient love and modern barbarism, by the renaissance of Brezhnev and Oedipus and by the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its new freedom.