Fatelessness

At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn't particularly think of himself as Jewish. In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider. The genius of Imre Kertesz's unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.