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A Los Angeles Times Notable Book

“Spring Flowers, Spring Frost is murky and capricious at times, yet with flashes of compelling wit and the frenetic syncopation of life about to be sucked back down a black hole…. Kadare is closer here to Swift than to Kafka; he cuts sharp and all ways. ”

— Richard Eder, New York Times Book Review

“Fans of the fantastical, veterans of Borges and Kafka, may recognize the familiar combination of the mundane and the extraordinary…. With a breezy fluency, [Kadare] solves his mysteries with a political and mythical flair. ”

— Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Throughout the book, images of icebergs, the Titanic, and enchanted snakes recur, all of which may represent Albania and its various misguided governors. The result is like a dream— seemingly full of stirring meanings whose interpretations remain tantalizingly out of reach. ”

— The New Yorker

“[Kadare’s] mixture of the realistic and the allegorical, the crush- ingly mundane and the eerily fantastic, is probably the best way to capture the inherent contradictions of present-day Albania…. The result is a heady brew of local traditions and universal themes. ”

— Washington Post Book World

“Impish, blackly comic … Underneath all this literary playfulness … lurks genuine insight into the duality of human nature and the often two-faced relations between men and women. ”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“Mind-bending … Compelling … One often has the sense of having wandered into alien terrain, a Balkan universe with undertones of Borges and Kafka…. Be prepared to have your sense of reality nudged a little out of kilter. ”

— Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

“A great pleasure to read. As an exercise in what writers from the formerly communist countries are now attempting, it is exem- plary.

— Washington Times

“A rich, symbolic questioning of humanity’s capacity for creating a murderless society … The predicament of human com- munity, which may be human nature, is enough to send any man cowering back to the womb. Philosophical fiction of great poetry and power. ”

— Booklist, starred review

“Kadare artfully portrays how an individual is affected when his society is suddenly released from long oppression. Highly recommended. ”

— Library Journal, starred review

“A folktale of enchantment and transformation … as spare and haunting as anything Kadare has ever written. ”

— Kirkus Reviews

“The juxtaposition of ideas and bizarre images is alternately beautiful, peculiar, and provocative, as Kadare once again pro- vides an excellent glimpse at the difficult nature of life in a politically unstable land. ”

— Publishers Weekly

“In Ismail Kadare’s latest novel, Albania awakes from the isolation and terror it experienced under communist dictatorship…. Between the chapters that tell this story is a series of ‘counter-chapters’ in which the writing breaks free from the restraints of naturalism and where Kadare shows his virtuosity as novelist and poet…. Each is handled with masterful skill. ”