The Notebook Trilogy
Ágota Kristóf author David Watson translator Alan Sheridan translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Publishing:5th Nov '26
£9.99
This title is due to be published on 5th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion -- Slavoj Žižek
A stunning, brutal and beautifully written (and translated) book -- George Szirtes
Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive -- Eimear McBride
A dark study of the human psyche * The New York Times Book Review *
At the heart of this acrid trilogy we can feel the author’s slow-burning rage at the wholesale erasure of certainty and continuity in the world of her childhood and adolescence. She will reassemble a shattered world on her own rigorous terms, and watch us wince and shudder in the process * TLS *
In prose stripped to a bare yet powerful structure, this intense parable reveals the triumph of literature in a politically repressive state * Booklist *
A haunting, harrowing tale that lingers in the imagination long after you’ve turned the last page * The Washington Post *
ISBN: 9780241805671
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 35mm
Weight: 500g
352 pages