Mapped
Chronicle in Stone
Ismail Kadare
A boy watches his ancient stone city on its mountainside change hands again and again, Italians, Greeks, Italians, Greeks, Germans, in the chaos of the Second World War. Kadare's own Gjirokastër is the whole book: the steep grey stone houses with their cisterns and slate roofs, the castle brooding over the town, the aerodrome the Italians cut into the plain below, and the old bazaar where the city's life and rumour churn.
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The General of the Dead Army
Ismail Kadare
Kadare's Albania is a country of rain, mud and mountain silence, crossed twenty years after the war by an Italian general and a priest sent to recover their nation's dead. The map runs from the capital Tirana out through the northern highlands to old battlefields and a labourers' work camp, with the Adriatic coast and the port of Durrës always at the country's back.
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