Blinding: Volume 1

Mircea Cartarescu's prize-winning, genre-crossing memoir-novel of hallucinatory Bucharest is a bestseller in Romania. Blinding follows the protagonist's childhood and teenaged hospitalisation, his family's migration from Bulgaria the century before, his parents' courtship and the installation of the Communist regime. Personal and political history forms a lush backdrop to an engrossing tale that connects a travelling circus, secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots and New Orleanian swamps.