Biografi by Lloyd Jones

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WHEN New Zealander Lloyd Jones became one of last year's Booker Prize nominees for Mister Pip, bookies described him as an unknown. Those with better memories may recall how he caused a storm in the early 1990s with Biografi, an account of a visit to post-Communist Albania, where he tracked down dentist Petar Shapallo, said to be the decoy-double of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. But did Shapallo exist? Or was he a metaphor for how the Albanian state systematically rewrote each citizen's life story (biografi) to fit the official line? With his sly, detached humour, Jones portrays a bizarre, paranoid land governed by an even more bizarre, paranoid dictator.

Republished now as fiction, Biografi leaves you wishing that a real-life Shapallo figure may still show up.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

When Biografi was first published, it was met first with enormous critical acclaim -- only to become the centre of a heated controversy. Was it fact or fiction? Had Lloyd Jones concocted his story of life in the new Albania? Or was it travel literature as its publishers insisted? Equal parts travelogue, political reportage and bizarre mystery novel, Lloyd Jones crosses Albania as it reinvents itself - a volatile, surreal wonderland where nothing is quite as it seems.