WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025 A breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and graffiti vandalism 'Propulsive and revelatory' The New York Times 'A work of genius' 5-star review, Telegraph Gentle giant Florian Herscht is an orphan, adopted by a neo-Nazi who has apprenticed him as a graffiti cleaner. The Boss, a Bach fanatic, is enraged that someone is spraying wolf emblems across the monuments to the famed composer in their east German town. He is determined to punish the culprit and Florian has no choice but to join his gang as they devise a plan to catch him. But Florian has bigger things to worry about: having attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he can see that the world might end at any moment. Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai's novel is a tour de force, a moving character study, a blistering satire and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas we face today. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

Herscht 07769 is a work of genius, astonishingly well translated by Ottilie Mulzet: I can only imagine the labour and dedication involved in capturing the rhythms of Krasznahorkai's clauses, their strange and captivating music -- 5-star review * Telegraph *
Remarkable * Times Literary Supplement *
Propulsive and revelatory ... Krasznahorkai is a universalist cut loose from the shibboleths of humanism * The New York Times *
A humane, compelling, intriguing novel ... comedic, if macabre, and cinematic * Scotsman *
A beast of a book ... vanishingly rare and beguiling * Daily Mail *
A novel that reaches for wonder and wisdom, and a paean to depth and meaning amid violence and death * Irish Times *
Innovative to a fault * Guardian *
A tour-de-force, satirical novel * Bristol Magazine *
Praise for László Krasznahorkai * : *
The contemporary master of the apocalypse -- Susan Sontag
Krasznahorkai throws down a challenge: raise your game or get your coat ... the intensity of his commitment to the art of fiction is indisputable ... exhilarating, even euphoric -- Hari Kunzru
László Krasznahorkai writes prose of breathtaking energy and beauty ... He has elevated the novel form and is to be ranked among the great European novelists -- Colm Toibin
The universality of Krasznahorkai's vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing -- W.G. Sebald

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written 14 novels and won multiple awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025, the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement and the 2024 Prix Formentor. Several of his most famous novels, including Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, were turned into films by the director Béla Tarr. His books have been translated into forty-two languages, and his most recent, Herscht 07769, was published in 2024. He lives in the hills of Pilisszentlászló in Hungary. Ottilie Mulzet is a literary critic and translator of Hungarian. She received the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature in and the 2014 Best Translated Book Award.