” No!” is the first word of Imre Kertesz`s haunting novel, Kaddish for an Unborn Child. It is how the novel`s narrator, a middle-aged Hungarian-Jewish writer, answers an acquaintance who asks him if he has a child, & it is how he answered his wife years earlier when she told him that she wanted one. The loss, longing & regret that haunt the years between these two ” No!”s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertesz`s narrator addresses the child he couldn`t bear to bring into the world, he takes readers on a mesmerising, lyrical journey through his life, from his childhood to Auschwitz to his failed marriage.