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In 1944 Imre Kertész, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy from Budapest, was deported to Auschwitz. He told the officials he was a sixteen-year-old worker, which spared him, and was sent on to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. He spent about ten years turning that year into a novel; a Hungarian state publisher rejected it in 1973, and when Fatelessness finally appeared in 1975 it was barely noticed. For decades he lived on translating Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein. In 2002 he became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This guide covers his eight key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 key books · 1975–2006 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Imre Kertész’s best-known book is Fatelessness (1975), the novel of a Budapest boy deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It forms a loose trilogy with Fiasco (1988) and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990); Liquidation (2003) returns to the same ground. Start with Fatelessness, then read on for the order of the rest and the 2002 Nobel Prize.
Where to Start with Imre Kertész
If you want his defining book
→ Fatelessness (1975) — the camps seen through a boy who refuses to be shocked.
If you want something short first
→ The Union Jack (1991) — a novella of about eighty pages.
If you want the voice of the survivor afterwards
→ Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) — one long monologue against having a child.
If you want the man himself
→ Dossier K. (2006) — his memoir, written as an interview with himself.
8 Imre Kertész Books, in Order
Fatelessness
György Köves, a teenage boy from Budapest, is deported in 1944 to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald and Zeitz, and returns to the city in 1945. He tells it all in a flat, accepting voice that registers each step as natural. Kertész drew on his own deportation. It first appeared in English as Fateless (1992) and in Tim Wilkinson’s translation as Fatelessness (2004); Lajos Koltai filmed it as Fateless (2005) from Kertész’s own screenplay.
The Pathseeker
An unnamed “commissioner” travels with his wife to a city in Germany and, over two days, visits the sites around it, Weimar and Buchenwald among them, looking for physical traces of what happened there. The last stop, a factory in a place called only “Z.”, points to Zeitz, where Kertész himself was held. Translated by Tim Wilkinson in 2008.
Detective Story
Antonio Martens, a former officer of the secret police in an unnamed Latin American country, writes his confession while awaiting trial after the fall of “the Colonel”. He describes how he was assigned to watch Federigo Salinas, a liberal department-store owner, and his student son Enrique, and how the surveillance ended in their deaths.
Fiasco
The first part follows “the old boy”, an ageing writer modelled on Kertész, going through his notes, including the 1973 rejection letter for his first novel. The second part is a novel within the novel: György Köves wakes on a plane, lands in a nameless city much like post-war Budapest, and is hired, fired and moved about by authorities he never sees. It reached English, again in Tim Wilkinson’s translation, only in 2011.
Kaddish for an Unborn Child
A middle-aged writer explains, in one long, furious monologue, why he refused his wife’s wish for a child: he will not bring a child into the world that produced Auschwitz. The refusal costs him his marriage. The book completes the sequence begun in Fatelessness and Fiasco.
The Union Jack
An older narrator tries to tell a story he finds hard to tell, about the young man of about twenty he was in Communist Hungary, his discovery of Wagner’s Die Walküre, and the moment in 1956 when he saw a jeep flying the Union Jack. About eighty pages in English (Melville House).
Liquidation
B., a writer and Auschwitz survivor, has killed himself with morphine. His friend Kingbitter (Keserű in the Hungarian), an editor at a failing state publishing house in Budapest after the fall of Communism, searches for the novel B. is said to have left and finds only a play, Liquidation, that seems to foresee the lives of the people around him. B.’s former wife Judit left him because he refused to have a child, the thread from Kaddish.
Dossier K.
His only memoir, written as a long interview in which Kertész questions himself. It covers his parents in Budapest, his Jewishness, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the decades under Communism, and the relation between his life and his fiction. Translated by Tim Wilkinson in 2013.
In What Order to Read Imre Kertész
Read Fatelessness, Fiasco and Kaddish for an Unborn Child in that order: Kertész conceived them as a sequence, and the second and third only make full sense once you know the first. Fiasco is partly the story of how Fatelessness was rejected; Kaddish is the survivor in middle age. Liquidation then carries the same questions past 1989.
The novellas — The Pathseeker, Detective Story and The Union Jack — stand alone and can be read at any point. Keep Dossier K. for last, when you know the novels it keeps comparing with his life.
A reading path
1. Fatelessness (1975)
2. Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990)
3. Fiasco (1988)
4. Liquidation (2003)
5. Dossier K. (2006)
Everything Else Imre Kertész Published
Beyond the 8 key books: 6 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Diaries, essays and lectures
6
6 books · 1992–2014
- 1992Gályanaplóhis diary-novel of 1961–1991, known in English as Galley Boat-Log; only excerpts translated
- 1993A holocaust mint kultúrathree lectures; the title means “The Holocaust as Culture”
- 1997Valaki másnotebooks; the title means “Someone Else: A Chronicle of the Change”
- 1998A gondolatnyi csend, amíg a kivégzőosztag újratöltessays and speeches
- 2001A száműzött nyelvessays; the title means “The Exiled Language”
- 2014A végső kocsmalate notebooks; the title means “The Final Tavern”
The years · 1929–2016
Quick facts about Imre Kertész
- Known for
- Kertész is known for turning his deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager into fiction that refuses consolation, above all in Fatelessness, and for being the first Hungarian Nobel laureate in literature.
- 1929
- Born in Budapest
- 1944
- Deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald
- 1975
- Fatelessness
- 2002
- Nobel Prize in Literature
- 2016
- Dies in Budapest, aged 86
- Born
- 9 November 1929, Budapest, into a Jewish family
- Deported
- 1944, aged fourteen, to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and Zeitz; liberated 1945
- Worked
- Journalist at Világosság until 1951, then freelance writer and translator of Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Canetti
- Nobel Prize
- 2002, the first Hungarian winner in literature
- Later life
- Lived for years in Berlin; his literary estate went to the Akademie der Künste there
- Died
- 31 March 2016, at home in Budapest, aged 86
The red mark is 1975: Fatelessness, the novel of his deportation that he spent about ten years writing.
How Imre Kertész Writes: No Past Tense for Auschwitz
The defining choice in Fatelessness is the narrator’s voice. György Köves reports the selection, the camps and the hunger in the order he experienced them, without hindsight and often with a boy’s matter-of-fact acceptance, so the reader is never given the comfort of a moral frame the boy does not have. The Swedish Academy cited “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”.
His later books are built from monologue, notebooks and fiction folded inside fiction. Kaddish is one unbroken speech; Fiasco sets a novel inside the notes of a failed writer; Liquidation hides its story in a play; Dossier K. is an interview with himself. In his Nobel lecture he said that in his writing “the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense”.
Chance runs through all of it: survival as luck rather than merit, and history as something that happens to people rather than something they choose. He rejected conventional Holocaust storytelling and called representations that missed this, Schindler’s List among them, kitsch. He also said the writer writes for himself, not for an audience.
Frequently asked questions about Imre Kertész’s books
How many books has Imre Kertész written?
More than fifteen in Hungarian. Eight are the key books on this page, from Fatelessness (1975) to Dossier K. (2006); the other six listed below are diaries, notebooks, essays and lectures, several of them not translated into English.
What are Imre Kertész’s books in order?
Fatelessness (1975), The Pathseeker (1977), Detective Story (1977), Fiasco (1988), Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990), The Union Jack (1991), Liquidation (2003) and Dossier K. (2006). The years are those of the Hungarian first editions.
Where should I start with Imre Kertész?
With Fatelessness, ideally in Tim Wilkinson’s 2004 translation. If you want something short first, try Dossier K. for the man or The Union Jack for the style.
What is Imre Kertész’s most famous book?
Fatelessness (1975), the novel of György Köves, a Budapest boy deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944. It was rejected by a state publisher in 1973 and barely noticed on publication, but became his best-known book after the 2002 Nobel Prize.
Is Fatelessness a true story?
It draws closely on Kertész’s own deportation in 1944 to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz, but it is a novel, narrated by the fictional György Köves. Dossier K. is where he discusses the relation between his life and the book.
Has Fatelessness been made into a film?
Yes. Fateless (Sorstalanság, 2005), directed by Lajos Koltai, with a screenplay by Kertész himself. It premiered in Hungary in 2005.
In what order should I read the Fatelessness trilogy?
Fatelessness (1975), Fiasco (1988), then Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990). Liquidation (2003) is often read as a fourth part: its central figure, B., refused to have a child, as the narrator of Kaddish did.
Why did Imre Kertész win the Nobel Prize?
The Swedish Academy gave him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. He was the first Hungarian to win it.
Why was Imre Kertész controversial in Hungary?
Some Hungarians resented that the country’s first literature Nobel went to a Jewish writer. In a 2009 interview with Die Welt he called himself a “Berliner” and Budapest “completely Balkanized”, which drew sharp reactions in the Hungarian press; he later said on Duna TV that he had meant it constructively and that Hungary was still his homeland.
Is Imre Kertész still alive?
No. He died on 31 March 2016 at his home in Budapest, aged 86, after a long illness. He was born in Budapest on 9 November 1929.
Footnotes
- Imre Kertész — Wikipedia
- Imre Kertész — Bio-bibliography, NobelPrize.org
- Imre Kertész — Nobel Lecture, NobelPrize.org
- Jewish Nobel literature laureate Imre Kertesz dies at 86 — The Times of Israel, 2016
- Adam Kirsch on Fiasco — The New Republic, 2011
- Imre Kertész — complete-review.com
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“In short, I died once, so I could live.”
— Imre Kertész, Nobel Lecture “Heureka!” (2002), translated by Ivan Sanders
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