Unavailable in the UK for over twenty years, Agota Kristof’s modern European classic The Notebook is re-issued by CBe alongside the first English translation of The Illiterate, Kristof’s memoir of how she escaped from Hungary in 1956 and began to write The Notebook. The Proof and The Third Lie, which conclude the trilogy of which The Notebook is the first part, are available from CBe in a single volume.

‘A stunning, brutal and beautifully written (and translated) book’ – George Szirtes

‘There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Agota Kristof’s trilogy’ – Slavoj Zizek

Sent to a remote village for the duration of the war, two children devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to pain and sentiment. They steal, kill, blackmail and survive; others – the cobbler, the harelipped girl who craves love, the children’s parents – are sucked into war’s brutal maelstrom. The Notebook distils the experience of Nazi occupation and Soviet ‘liberation’ during World War II into a stark fable of timeless relevance.