“Solenoid” is a surreal novel about a Romanian school teacher who aspires to become an author but instead finds himself grappling with a lice epidemic among his students. As he discovers various solenoids (electromagnets) scattered throughout Bucharest, he reflects on mathematics, the nature of reality, and the mysteries of life.
“The Last Hundred Days” is a novel about the fall of the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s in 1989. The story follows a young British man who relocates to Bucharest to teach English at the local university. He tries to find his way in the corrupt and paranoid Romanian society but suddenly finds himself at the heart of the revolution.
“Life Begins on Friday” is set in 1897 Bucharest, when the Romanian capital was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city often referred to as ‘Little Paris’. The story begins with a young man found mortally wounded in the snow. Nearby, another man is discovered unconscious, with no memory of how he arrived at the scene. Is he somehow connected to the death of the first man?
“Hansen’s Children” is a novel set in South-Eastern Romania in 1989, focusing on patients who attempt to escape from a leper colony just before the collapse of Ceaușescu’s repressive communist regime.
In “The Land of Green Plums”, Lola, a student in Timișoara, is found dead in her student accommodation. Following her death, Lola’s diary becomes a refuge for the narrator and her friends, all young people from the German-Romanian minority known as ‘Banat Swabians’. They are being watched by the Securitate, the secret police in Ceaușescu’s Communist Romania, and their lives remain under threat even after some of them manage to escape to Germany.
In the novel “Wasted Morning”, the protagonist Vica Delca is an elderly but spirited woman who lives in Bucharest around 1975. The novel follows her tram journeys across the city as she seeks to escape her husband and to visit her sister-in-law and friend Ivona. Through their conversations, “Wasted Morning” unveils the personal stories of these women and offers a vivid portrayal of Romanian life throughout the 20th century.
“The Great Fortune” – the first book of “The Balkan Trilogy” – is a historical novel set at the beginning of the Second World War, focusing on an English couple in Romania. Newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle arrive in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939, aiming to establish themselves in the city’s expatriate and academic circles. They remain largely oblivious to the growing dangers around them. As the German army invades Romania, they flee first to Athens and then to Alexandria.
“Night” is a short auto-biographical book by Elie Wiesel, describing his experiences in the Jewish ghetto of his hometown Sighet (now Sighetu Marmației) in Romania, near the Ukrainian border, as well as his time in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
“The Town with Acacia Trees” centres on Adriana and Gelu, a young couple growing up in a provincial Romanian town during the 1930s. The novel beautifully describes how Adriana and Gelu fall in love, but when Adriana moves to Bucharest and meets the composer Cello, her love for Gelu is put to the test.
“A Bach Concert” is a Romanian family saga centred on the Hallipa family, revolving around a Bach concert organised for Bucharest’s high society in the years following the First World War. The novel is a classic of Romanian literature.