Romanian Books

Have you ever wondered what places, what moments make up and define you?

Can you say with certainty what home means?

For people who live between worlds, home becomes the very interstice, that intermediate space between two successive redefinitions.

Diana Radovan's personal and travel essays will take you across contemporary Germany, but especially into the vulnerable interior of the immigrant who searches, in this fascinating and strange topography, for the metaphorical map of her own rediscovery.

Diana Radovan writes about how we lose ourselves and how we find ourselves throughout our lives. And I didn't think it was possible to write so honestly about what the experience of a life in search means. The search for a place, a state, a home. A combination of a West and an East that are personal to Diana, but which become, as we browse her pages, personal to ourselves

A book that follows, with every kilometer, a return home, which often takes unexpected forms - sometimes it's the flavor of Greece, sometimes it's the adrenaline of running, sometimes it's the baton handed over by one's own son before the last 250 meters of a marathon.

Even if, at some point, that same son didn't choose you. Even if you only started running at 40. Even if, in a dead end, you chose Greece just because it was close.

With courageous sincerity and sparkling humor, Raluca Kisescu speaks in the language of women about the world of men. In the language of mothers about the world of children. Any immodesty is not boldness, but the hard-to-speak truth. In her journey to recovery, pain becomes strength, runners become characters, and she herself becomes a new mother, who allows herself to love, to forgive, to reconquer territories she thought were lost

In 1966, Baltimore is a city of secrets that everyone seems to know - everyone except Madeline 'Maddie' Schwartz.

A year ago she was a happy, even spoiled wife - now, she has left her husband, after twenty years of marriage, determined to fulfill her youthful dream, to find the purpose and passion of her life, to leave her mark on a world in constant change.

When he helps the police find the lifeless body of a murdered girl, he manages to get a job at the city's afternoon newspaper, the Star .

Here, she has the opportunity to build a reputation and it seems she has found exactly the story to propel her: a missing woman whose body is discovered in a park fountain.

But the woman is black, and everyone's prejudice means that Maddie becomes the only person who cares about why she was killed.

In her search, Maddie comes into contact with all kinds of people who, until then, were far outside her circles.

But, often, ambition and tenacity blind her, and her inability to see beyond her own needs will spell disaster, both for her and for those around her

This group of essays is/is intended to be an invitation to a journey through the universe of Man, with several possible paths, which, by following, the reader will feel as if he or she is becoming richer with a new beauty, with a new light, with a new mystery, with a new achievement as an escape upwards from the labyrinth that too closely resembles a human life

The second volume of the Are Murders series

The series was adapted by NETFLIX into an exceptional series

Secrets, revenge and a violent crime disturb the idyllic town of Are

The body of Johan Andersson, a former Olympic skier, is found in the Swedish ski resort of Are. The man appears to have been beaten to death in the woods. According to his wife, he had no enemies in the world. In the eyes of inspectors Hanna Ahlander and Daniel Lindskog, the murder proves otherwise. But what could have caused such anger? And to whom?

While the police search for answers, Rebecka Ekvall, the vulnerable wife of a pastor, is caught in an abusive marriage. Isolated from her congregation, Rebecka fears for her life. Because she carries a terrible secret with her. But she's not the only person in Are hiding things.

As they unravel the dark threads of a growing list of suspects, Hanna and Daniel realize that Johan's murder is just the beginning of a case about survival and revenge at all costs

A magnetic, lucid and irresistible prose, in which a doctoral thesis gradually takes on the shape of an interior novel, and Salinger is just the ideal pretext to talk about loneliness, fascination and the deep need to be listened to. At the seminar led by a reserved and ironic doctoral student, the lectures become mirrors, and the students' comments - confessions.

In Salinger and the Girl with the Red Hair, Andrei Mocuta manages the rare feat of transforming room 420, with its dusty air and gentle fluorescence, into a living, tense, often tender space, where the professor's voice oscillates between erudition and vulnerability.

Surrounded by lyrical interventions, eccentric observations and silences with subtext, he discreetly keeps his attention, while literature opens bridges between generations, between solitudes, but especially between words and feelings. And the girl with the red hair and ethereal gestures spreads a gentle mystery, enough to keep you captivated until the last page

Since I was a child, I always dreamed of a life at sea and in the port of Constanta. God helped me, and my dream came true: I attended three years of maritime school, and at not even 27 years old I was appointed commander of the port of Constanta, responsible for Romania's maritime gateway and its security.

Being a port operations officer means a great responsibility, but also a great joy. It is a job that gives you the freedom to travel, to see the world and to always learn something new. My career has been and will remain a devoted service to the sea.

For us, people of ports and oceans, life means movement. And movement is, in turn, life - a continuous flow, from birth to death.

Even after I was injured, with God's help I managed to continue on my path. I lived a beautiful and meaningful life, growing up on the shores of the sea, in the great port dear to my soul - Constanta

A mysterious box. Two notebooks. A letter that reopens wounds thought to be closed forever.

In Petting the Cat, the disturbing sequel to the novel 'I Am the Blue-Haired Boy', the past returns with the force of an echo impossible to ignore. Alice, the woman who has built a life far from Romania, in the quiet of a self-imposed isolation, is suddenly pushed back into the labyrinth of memories and painful experiences, by an unexpected package.

The novel is a story about the fragility and strength of the human heart, about the pain of separation and the impossibility of erasing true love, even after years of silence. Between the shadows of the past and the attempt to find herself, Alice discovers that love never fades, but remains hidden, ready to burst out again where the wound is still alive.

Petting the Cat is a novel of finding love, confronting one's own demons, and the hope that, after darkness, there is always a light that can heal

Two estranged brothers. One woman. An authoritarian father killed by a galloping cancer. A wedding on the fast track.

Arriving urgently from Canada with Mircea, Ina defies the stereotypes that Silviu, her future brother-in-law, tries to fit her into. Mircea, obsessed with business, neglects her. Left alone in the Fagaras Mountains, Silviu and Ina grope each other on a dangerous ridge route. The magnetism is palpable. When the elements are unleashed, the two collapse into an intimacy that weakens them. Over the moral impasse, the pandemic spreads. Life is an unpredictable flood, and from the proximity of death, the question resounds, irrepressible:

To betray or to betray, endlessly, only yourself? A love story, but also a psychological novel about taboos and traumas, rivalry and resentment, faith and cruelty, technology and direct experience. An X-ray of a fractured society and an allegory about opposing visions that need each other to complete themselves

Under the Gravity of Memory is first and foremost a book with countless stories. Some span centuries, others years, days or minutes, but all are fascinating. Stories full of meaning, which compress worlds and times, people and histories, places and mentalities, which distill collective experiences in a new, surprising way. They create vertigos of memory and short-circuit times.

The author's pleasure in storytelling emanates from every sentence of the book. For him, the world seems to be made just to be told, it is its only reason for existing. If it were not told, it would not exist. The narrative lines of his texts bring together everything they encounter: from historical or family events to personal testimonies, from archive details to direct observations or those of contemporaries, from literary evocations to press excerpts. The texts in the volume are a hybrid of autobiographical prose, reportage, literary history, cultural studies and essay, in a relaxed and often playful tone, in which the scrupulousness of analysis or observation gives way to meditation, humor and poetry.

Among other things, we learn how the Sugar Factory in Ripiceni financially supported the literary avant-garde in the interwar period, that the outlaw Coroi was connected to legionnaires, about the avant-garde wedding in Iasi of Marcu Taingiu and what became of Moldov, the co-founder, along with Sasa Pana, of the magazine UNU, about the 'indestructible toy' factory 'Teddy' in Botosani, about how Scarlat Callimachi earned the nickname 'the red prince', how Dumitru Cornilescu ended up translating the Bible in the mansion in Stancesti and much more