Her story begins in 1977, in a village at the foot of the Carpathian mountains in Ceausescus Romania. She is seventeen and madly in love with a mysterious, handsome boy called Mihai. When Monas friends and family begin to disappear, Mona begins to wonder about this man she has fallen for. One night, narrowly escaping the police, she flees to Chicago, where she struggles to move forward and not to look back, to bury the longing for the country and...

While serving a community service sentence for young offenders, a Romanian immigrant boy and a troubled British girl fall in love.

The haunting novel from Paul Bailey, whose work has been short-listed twice for the Booker Prize. At the age of seventy, Andrew Peters looks back across the years to remember life with his doting Uncle Rudolf, who rescued him from fascist Romania as a child. Vivid, often hilarious, stories of Rudolf's brilliant but blighted singing career are intertwined with the slow unfolding of secrets that have shadowed Andrew's otherwise happy life. Told in matchless...

"When Irina--Romanian by birth but brought up by American parents who have never understood her--arrives at college she quickly abandons ordinary student life for an affair with an older, mysterious Romanian man named Andrei. Andrei awakens a powerful sensuality in Irina. And he has money--lots of it. For the first time, Irina feels free. But the longer she stays with Andrei, the more she is certain that she can't leave, and that [she] may be complicit...