Powerful, empathetic, at times harrowing... executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness... A chilling, humane and strangely beautiful work * Independent *
[Kadare] captures the paranoid nature of life under constant surveillance...and produces an ironic masterpiece * Daily Mail *
Filled with striking images and conceits... a powerful Kafkaesque charge... Kadare's imaginative intelligence ensures that it is chilling and intriguing -- Theo Tait * Sunday Times *
A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make - as Kadare himself had to do -- John Banville * Financial Times *
The literature Kadare has produced in the face of obstacles lesser writers would find insuperable, is, genuinely, of world significance... Invites comparison with Milan Kundera's recent satire on Stalinism, The Festival of Insignificance. Both writers are favourites, year-in, year-out for the Nobel prize. Kadare will not damage his prospects with A Girl in Exile -- John Sutherland * The Times *