Sent to a remote village to live with their grandmother, twins Claus and Lucas devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to the ongoing horrors of war and living under a totalitarian regime. When their bond is tested, their collective ‘we’ shatters and the boys become isolated in different countries. Lucas is challenged to prove his identity and that of his missing brother, a defector to ‘the other side’.

Kristóf’s haunting and unforgettable masterpiece has been an international phenomenon ever since its first publication in French 40 years ago. Distilling the brutally fracturing effects of war and displacement onto identity and memory, and our need for stories in our search for unity and meaning, The Notebook Trilogy is stark fable of timeless relevance.

There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be ... Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook awoke in me a cold and cruel passion -- Slavoj Žižek
A stunning, brutal and beautifully written (and translated) book -- George Szirtes
Both stylistically inventive and politically incisive -- Eimear McBride
A dark study of the human psyche * The New York Times Book Review *
At the heart of this acrid trilogy we can feel the author’s slow-burning rage at the wholesale erasure of certainty and continuity in the world of her childhood and adolescence. She will reassemble a shattered world on her own rigorous terms, and watch us wince and shudder in the process * TLS *
In prose stripped to a bare yet powerful structure, this intense parable reveals the triumph of literature in a politically repressive state * Booklist *
A haunting, harrowing tale that lingers in the imagination long after you’ve turned the last page * The Washington Post *

Ágota Kristóf was born in Csikvánd, Hungary, in 1935. Aged twenty-one, Kristóf and her husband and four-month-old daughter fled the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising to Austria and were resettled in French-speaking Switzerland. Working in a factory, Kristóf slowly learned the language of her adopted country. Her first novel, The Notebook (1986), won the European Prize for French literature and was translated into forty languages. Kristóf’s other work included plays and stories as well as The Proof (1988) and The Third Lie (1991), which complete the trilogy begun with The Notebook. She died in 2011.