A masterly new novel from the 2002 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature: the story of a Hungarian writer whose death forces his circle of friends to confront their own terrible moment in history.

Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B.-a writer of high literary reputation whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability-has taken his own life. Among his papers, his friend Kingbitter discovers a play titled Liquidation in which he reads an eerie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.'s other friends now face: having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hopefulness that rose from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little but a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.

Kingbitter, desperate to understand his friend's suicide, begins a furious search for the novel he believes might be among B.'s papers and might provide the key. But the search takes him in unexpected directions: deep into his own memories and into those of B.'s ex-wife, Judith, the hidden corners of their lives revealed-to themselves and to us-at the same time as the mystery of B.'s life is slowly unraveled.

An intricately layered story of history and humanity-powerful, disturbing, lyrical, achingly suspenseful, brilliantly told.