Revue de presse
"engaging" - The New York Times Book Review
"stunning" - The Times
"an assured performance" - The Literary Review
"Sinister, comic and lyrical, it vividly captures the end of a long nightmare" - i-newspaper
"...a coming-of-age story with a vivid historical backdrop..." - Washington Post
"It's a brilliant first novel set in 1989, in the writhing demise of communist Bucharest - dark, immaculately written, bitterly lucid and very gripping." - James Wood - New Statesman Book of the Year
"..engrossing debut novel..I defy anyone not to revel in 350-odd pages of it at least" --Time Out Magazine ****
Présentation de l'éditeur
WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE 2012
WINNER OF THE 2012 WRITERS GUILD AWARD FOR 'BEST FICTION BOOK'
LONG-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2011
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2011 COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE 2012
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE AUTHORS CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2012
Set during Ceausescu's last hundred days in power, Patrick McGuinness's accomplished debut novel explores a world of danger, repression and corruption.
When our narrator, a young English student with a damaged past and an uncertain future, arrives in Bucharest he finds himself in a job he never applied for. With duties that become increasingly ambiguous and precarious, he soon finds himself uncomfortably and often dangerously close to the eye of the storm. He learns, as he goes, the uncertainty of friendships in a surveillance society: friendships that are compromised and riddled with danger and duplicity. He encounters dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-markerteers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, their lives all intertwined against a background of severe poverty and repression as Europe's most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.
The socialist state is in stasis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceausescu s demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows.
Biographie de l'auteur
Patrick McGuinness is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne s College where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry is published by Carcanet and he has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003 and the Poetry Business Prize in 2006. He frequently writes and presents for radio, eg A Short History of Stupidity and The Art of Laziness for R3 and Night Waves and Women s Hour on poetry, French culture and his own work as a poet and translator. His translation of Mallarme s For Anatole s Tomb, 2004 was the Poetry Book Society s Translation Choice. His other books include studies of theatre, French culture and literature. Patrick is a frequent contributor to TLS, and TLRB and reads and speaks at literary festivals in UK , US, Canada , France , Czech Republic , Austria and Italy .
