Liquidation - Tapa blanda

"A beautiful glimpse of the wide-open spaces of storytelling" (Daily Telegraph)

"A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel, which, in this fine translation, reads as if it were written in this century, not the last" (Sunday Times)

"The real power of Liquidation...lies in the corrosive intensity of Kertész's disillusionment and the fervency of his desire to communicate it to us...it's a quick read, a short afternoon's conversation with a wonderfully sharp old man" (Michael Faber Guardian)

"Liquidation, suspenseful and bleakly comic, reads like a treatise on the mystery of the end of life and the mystery of suicide. I found it a compelling if deeply unsettling work" (Ian Thomson Independent)

"When the Hungarian Kertész won the Nobel prize for Literature in 2002, few in Britain had even heard of him. Shame on us for our insularity - and hurrah for Harvill, the publisher that keeps us supplied with foreign masterpieces" (Kate Saunders The Times)

"A beautiful glimpse of the wide-open spaces of storytelling"

"A masterly, subtle and constantly surprising novel, which, in this fine translation, reads as if it were written in this century, not the last"

Kingbitter, an editor at a publishing house on the verge of closure, believes himself to have been the closest friend of a celebrated writer and Auschwitz survivor, B, who recently committed suicide. Amongst the papers B has left him, Kingbitter finds a play entitled Liquidation that uncannily predicts the behaviour of B's ex-wife, his mistress and Kingbitter himself. As he obsessively reads and rereads the play, Kingbitter becomes transfixed with the idea that buried within these papers is B's great novel: the book that will explain his relationship with Auschwitz.

Harrowing but also bleakly comic, Liquidation is both a literary detective novel and an exploration of how B's decision to end his life after surviving the horrors of Auschwitz affects those he leaves behind.