Long-listed for The International Man Booker Prize 2017 (UK).

"The narrative unfurls with the shifting intensity of a dream, enriched by unsettlingly surreal details... It is a brilliant examination of the way that authoritarian structures operate: Kafka on a grander political scale." * Sunday Times * "Although on the surface this is a deeply compelling historical novel, its scope is wider. At heart, what Kadare seeks to demonstrate is the terrible nature of a world in which every human element is suborned to the state... Kadare well deserves his growing European audience." * Daily Telegraph * "An extraordinary and complex novel whose time has come...40 years after its initial publication [in Albanian]" * Herald * "In John Hodgson's lucid translation, The Traitor's Niche is absorbing from start to finish. Kadare's allegorical burlesque has rarely been so trenchant." * Spectator * "The novel is a hymn to language, something that, as Ottoman bureaucrats intent on obliterating it instinctively know, and as Kadare's novels prove, is not easily silenced" -- Claire Allfree * Daily Mail *

Ismail Kadare is Albania's best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2015.