Longlisted for the International Booker Prize
The Wall Street Journal, A Best Book of the Year
“A brilliantly probing novel about the power play between art and politics . . . Both personal and philosophical, A Dictator Calls is, finally, about the inescapable ‘mutual dependency’ between literature and the state. Of the two, however, it’s only the artist who is bound to try to make meaning from the relationship, ‘because art, unlike a tyrant,’ writes Mr. Kadare, ‘receives no mercy, but only gives it.'” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“[This] exceptional English translation also considers Kadare’s legacy and the legacies of anyone forced to toil in the shadow of a political system that seeks to dictate their voice and determine their fate. There are moments of real brilliance . . . The powerful words encapsulate not just the course of the novel and the arc of Kadare’s career, but also the purpose, as he sees it, of art in general.” —Cory Oldweiler, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A Dictator Calls is, then, an expression of the existential anxieties of an ageing literary titan, a work that seeks to contextualise, albeit indirectly, his artistic and political legacy.” —Bronwyn Scott-McCharen, Review31
“An interior, prismatic tale of writerly defiance.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This multifaceted examination amounts to a fascinating consideration of the relationship between totalitarianism and freedom of expression. Admirers of Kadare’s previous meldings of fact and fiction will be mesmerized.” —Publishers Weekly
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