Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

With its rich and sombre story of local traditions and universal themes, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost is a masterpiece belonging to Ismail Kadare’s purest classical vein.

The love story between a painter and a girl is set against the backdrop of a country in the midst of terrifying change as its inhabitants deal with the Westernization of a backward Balkan land, witness a series of strange events, and search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, which supposedly house records of crimes that may have been committed. Consisting of two separate, very unequal stories:  the better by far is a folktale of enchantment and transformation — the story of a girl “punished” by being given in marriage to a snake — that resembles a story out of Arabian Nights and is as spare and haunting as anything Kadare has ever written. 

"He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare is an original voice, universal, yet deeply rooted in his own soul."  -  Independent On Sunday

Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 in Albania, is the country’s best-known poet and novelist. Since the appearance of The General of the Dead Army in 1965, Kadare has published scores of stories and novels that make up a panorama of Albanian history linked by constant meditation on the nature and human consequences of dictatorship. His works, particularly The Monster and The Palace of Dreams, brought him into frequent conflict with the authorities, and in 1990 he sought political asylum in France.