Train to Trieste
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- £3.99
-
- £3.99
Publisher Description
It is 1977 and seventeen-year-old Mona Manoliu has fallen in love with Mihai, a mysterious boy who lives in the romantic mountain city where she spends her summers. She can think of nothing and no one else.
But life under Ceausescu's Romania is difficult. Hunger, paranoia and fear infect everyone. One day Mona sees Mihai wearing the black leather jacket favoured by the secret police. Is it possible he is one of them? As food shortages worsen and more of her loved ones disappear, Mona comes to understand that she must leave Romania.
She escapes in secret - narrowly avoiding the police - through Yugoslavia to Italy, and finally to Chicago. But she leaves without saying a final goodbye to Mihai. And though she struggles to bury her longing for the past, many years later she finds herself compelled to return, determined to learn the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's 1977 in Ceausescu's brutal Romania, and 17-year-old Mona Manoliu is falling for brooding Mihai Simionu, whom she meets on summer vacation in the Carpathian mountains. What should be a grandly simple first love is complicated by fear, especially for Mona's father, a Bucharest poetry professor tracked by the secret police. Death and secrets plague Mona and Mihai's affair, as friends and relatives die under suspicious circumstances. While the country slides further into poverty, paranoia is the norm, and Mona doesn't know whether to believe the rumors she hears about Mihai. But after her father is detained by police, and then released through the intervention of a former student, it's clear that Mona must leave Romania. Of the many well-known escape routes, she chooses to take the train to "Trieste" (actually the Yugoslav border). The book takes her much further than that, all the way to a confrontation with the truth about the men in her life, both past and present. Radulescu gives Mona a convincingly overwrought voice, loading her observations with sensory detail, literary and cultural references, and keening emotion. It won't be for everyone, but it offers a unique look at the shadowy world of a brutal dictatorship.
