Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

A masterpiece of economy, humour, and mythology - an indelible picture of the imagination freed from communistic glaciers.

As Spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers, unknown under the tyrannical ancient regime, strike up the National Bank. The ghastly Kanun, regulator of medieval Albania's blood vendettas, is dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And the ultraexplosive secrets of the state secrets, rumoured to be buried in the area, are threatening to flood the entire nation. As the dreamy painter Mark Gurabardhi struggles to complete a portrait of the iceberg that struck the Titanic, he finds his quiet life disturbed 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 found freedom.

Reviews

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

‘One of the may pleasures of Kadare's writing is his supremely light touch’ PATRICK MCGRATH, New York Times