Six books by writers from Romania, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with For Two Thousand Years and Solenoid.
Herta Müller, born in Romania's Banat region and writing in German, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Mihai Eminescu, who died in 1889, is regarded as Romania's national poet. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist rule, writers worked under censorship and the watch of the secret police.
Start with Mihail Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years, where a Jewish student in 1920s Bucharest meets rising antisemitism and nationalism among intellectuals. Liviu Rebreanu's Forest of the Hanged sets a Transylvanian Romanian officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, caught between loyalties. Ioana Pârvulescu's Life Begins on Friday captures Bucharest over the last thirteen days of 1897, and Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid is a schoolteacher's hallucinatory diary of the city in the 1980s.
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A Jewish student in 1920s Bucharest meets rising Romanian antisemitism and nationalism among intellectuals.
A schoolteacher's hallucinatory diary of grey 1980s Bucharest, with its decaying apartment blocks and communist-era daily life.
Transylvanian Romanian soldier serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, caught between loyalties.
A dark thriller-like novel of paranoia and surveillance in late Ceaușescu-era Romania.
Bucharest in 1897 over one week, capturing the city's customs, gossip and fin-de-siècle atmosphere.
Banat-Swabian students endure surveillance, fear and informers under Ceaușescu's dictatorship in 1980s Romania, told in fragmentary, poetic prose.
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