Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize
Winner of 2012 Wales Book of the Year
New Statesman Book of the Year 2011

"Drags you through the smoky backrooms of the dying days of Communist Romania. Funny, insightful and compelling." - Costa Prize Judges, 2011

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.