Based on Imre Kertész’s own experience in Nazi labour and concentration camps, it follows a young Hungarian Jew, György Köves, whose voice is comes from a mind processing atrocity as fact rather than as myth or moral lesson.

Almost absent of literary pathos and trope, there are no epiphanies of dignity, no triumphant reinventions; the intellectual work is in noticing what the ordinary self clings to when ordinary categories have been stripped away.

For readers who want to understand not just what happened but how it was experienced, Fatelessness remains one of the most rigorous and humane reckonings in Holocaust literature.