DECEMBER 13, 1981, WAS A good day for Albania’s Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, to bury bad news. General Wojciech Jaruzelski chose this moment to impose martial law in Poland and bring a temporary end to Solidarity’s struggle for freedom.

As always during the Cold War, such events in Eastern Europe were accompanied by apocalyptic predictions of nuclear war. So it was not surprising that the suicide of Hoxha’s trusted deputy, Mehmet Shehu, in his Tirana residence barely made it on to news agency reports.

In Albania, however, the death of Shehu (Beria to Hoxha’s Stalin) swept everything from the front page of the country’s only reliable news-paper, the Daily Rumour. For half a century, Albanians lived in an almost hermetically sealed society defined by drudgery and state terror. So Shehu’s death had the impact of the Kennedy assassination and the Moon-landing rolled into one.

Eyes continued to pop when Hoxha revealed that the dastardly Shehu had been nurturing a hideous conspiracy since the 1940s in collaboration with the CIA, MI6, the Yugoslav secret police and the KGB to sell out proud Albania’s independence.

Something was truly rotten in Hoxha’s kingdom but 25 years later, the circumstances surrounding Shehu’s death remain a mystery — notwithstanding the end of communism, the emergence of some documentation, eye-witness accounts and a novel by Shehu’s son, Bashkim.

Earlier this year, Ismail Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker Prize for International Literature. For some years, there have been persistent whispers about his suitability for Nobel status and Balkanologists have long recognised him as the towering genius of a distinct literary genre, the Balkan novel, which transcends the region’s violent conflicts. Kadare’s engagement with the Shehu story results in a crisp reflection on the nature of state terror; on the emotional background to political crimes; and on how fear eats the soul.

He has no intention of answering the question of what actually happened on the night of December 12 and 13 when Shehu was shot dead. If he did, it would interest Albanians but few others.

Instead, he starts from the uncontroversial premise that Hoxha bears overwhelming responsibility for the death, be it murder or suicide. From here, he takes us down the dark, terrifying or terrified alleys that exist in the minds of those involved — the dead Shehu, his family, the architect of his fancy Tirana residence, the Interior Minister and Hoxha himself. Other figures make brief appearances, such as Hoxha’s unspeakable wife, Nexhmije, and an old woman called Meme, who may be Shehu’s long-lost aunt or an agent for the secret police, the sigurimi.

Kadare developed a distinctive, impersonal style as a writer living under Hoxha. I have always assumed that he felt it prudent to emphasise a distance between him and his characters so that Hoxha and his zealots would not mistake fictional motives for the author’s beliefs.

In The Successor this is even more eerie as those characters who are decidedly real such as Hoxha, Shehu or Bashkim are referred to only iconically as the Guide, the Successor or the Son. The named characters are fictional — disguised representations of real people but products of the author’s imagination, nonetheless. As a consequence, dream and reality melt together, as in Kafka, making it difficult to identify where the nightmares really begin.

Kadare is a great author so it sad that, 15 years after the fall of communism in Albania, his work is still translated into English via French and not directly from Albanian. This results in some awkwardness and offers further evidence of the decline in interest among British publishers in embracing foreign literature. Had Kadare not won the International Booker then this strange, enlightening novel would have been denied us. How many other Kadares dwell in such unwarranted obscurity?

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