Liquidation is Imre Kertész’s final novel, written after the fall of communism and after his Nobel Prize, and it reads like a reckoning with both history and authorship itself.

Set in post-1989 Budapest, the novel follows a circle of editors and intellectuals grappling with the suicide of a writer known only as B., who survived Auschwitz but could not survive freedom. What unfolds is not a mystery diving into moral responsibility after catastrophe, the impossibility of “closure,” and where meaning might live.

The novel is steeped in the contradictions of post-totalitarian life — archives opening, truths fragmenting, lives exposed to reinterpretation. It is both intimate and philosophical. A true coda to a sensational body of work. 

First English-language hardback, published by Harvill Secker (Random House), 2006