Albania has been Europe's unreachable child. It was the last, after five centuries, to push away Ottoman rule. It was the last to grow out of Stalinism. For much of its modern history, xenophobic, it has sulked.

From his homeland's autistic isolation, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, born in 1936, has written over a dozen novels published in more than 40 countries. "The Successor," a whodunit tragicomedy about a Communist loyalist's death before his ascension to power, is the first to appear in the United States since Kadare became the inaugural recipient of the Man Booker International Prize, which honors a living author of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction. The finalists included Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth and John Updike.

Kadare's work, compared to that of the others, is harder to find, especially in English, and in a certain way harder to recommend. It is a fiction of dread, set in a landscape of rain and stone, with only the innermost thoughts of confused human beings to light the way. Its tone is ingenuous. Although translated from Albanian into French and then into English, Kadare's pliant sentences are at once disturbing and funny. He is often compared to Kafka, Orwell or Kundera, but his biography stands apart. For most of his life, he inhabited an actual not a psychological dystopia. He did not imagine totalitarian evil from the safe ramparts of democracy. Unlike Kundera, Kadare somehow avoided imprisonment.

He has said that to survive he attacked dictatorship obliquely through allegory and legend. One novel, "The Palace of Dreams," posited an absurdist bureaucracy where workers sort and classify the dreams of citizens, looking for subversion. Another, "The Pyramid," recast Albania's Stalinist tyrant, Enver Hoxha, as an Egyptian pharaoh, his people crushed by the endless construction of a pointless edifice. Sometimes, though, Kadare had to capitulate. "The Great Winter" is a flattering portrait of Hoxha that Kadare has admitted he wrote in an attempt to avoid prison or execution.

These are relatively straightforward cases, yet some of his novels have been more difficult to assess, in particular "Chronicle in Stone." Some see it as a magical story about Kadare's boyhood in an ancient town near the Greek border and a moving defense against homogenizing oppression. Some, noting that Hoxha and Kadare grew up on the same street in the same town a generation apart, see it as a valentine to a despot.

Hoxha died in 1985, and Kadare sought exile in Paris in 1990, almost a year before a weak democracy emerged in his country. He has said he felt threatened both by the crumbling Communist regime and by a vengeful opposition that saw him as Hoxha's inexplicably tolerated house novelist - or, worse, informant. "The Successor," which is set in the paranoid years of Hoxha's declining health, is loosely based on the suspected suicide of Albania's heir apparent, Mehmet Shehu, in 1981.

The novel opens with Kadare's characteristic simplicity. "The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14." The Successor (his name is never given) "succumbed to a nervous depression and took his own life with a firearm." But when Yugoslav radio suggests he might have been murdered, Albanian television issues "bulletins to allow for both versions of the event." This is the beginning of the novel's permutations of the Successor's last night. Looming over the search for the truth is not only manmade tyranny but the shadow of an even greater power: "In the middle of the sky, which stretched as far as the eye could see and carried the news far and wide, stood a high clump of clouds like a celestial wrath."

Why did the Successor's insomniac wife sleep so soundly that night? What of the architect who knew the secret passageway from the house of the man known as the Guide (a fictionalized version of Hoxha) to the dead man's basement? The Successor's daughter, a desperate sensualist, is clueless. Why did his son tell the architect about the passageway? Why did the Guide meet with the Successor's rival just before the death? What is known is that someone slipped into the house at midnight. In the rain and fog, it was hard to see much else.

While public conjecture gathers and dissipates and returns in different shapes, Kadare gives us the intimate interior monologues of his characters. We hear the frantic anguish of the architect, then that of the doctor who is asked to perform the autopsy, sure his selection means his doom. As the novel proceeds, we hear the daughter, the son, the rival, the Guide and, in the end, from the grave, the Successor himself. All the living characters obsess over what they actually did that night - and what others might have done. They anxiously invent and revise narratives that exonerate or incriminate themselves and others. Only the thoughts of the Successor's wife, for reasons revealed at the novel's end, are unknown.

It is possible to read "The Successor" as something of a coded commentary on Kadare's own life. Just as we long to know the cause of the Successor's death, so do we long to resolve Kadare's true place in Hoxha's Albania. The archive may yet be discovered that helps Kadare's part become clearer. Will we ever know? This novel finds its truth in the imagined words of a dead man, setting the individual over the many. It valorizes the imagination by arguing that the truth of a man is not always found in what he does or says but in his numinous interior, the place all great literature celebrates.