Kirjahaku

Two worlds--one story. Two worlds falling apart: Romania from the agony of Ceausescu's reign and under his successors to this day, and Nineveh the doomed, shortly before the Babylonian conquest in 612 BC. One story: rampant corruption, lawlessness, pervasive moral degradation, and cruelty. Rulers and robbers are almost impossible to distinguish from one another. A thin minority of honest people still try to change their worlds: some fight in bloody revolutions, others devise new laws. Do they have a chance? The lead character, a researcher, comes from their ranks. His is a long-term vision. He seems to think that, beyond their decline and punishment, both worlds have something left to salvage--their libraries, their cultural identities. "The Last Winter" relates his dreams, his struggle, and, implicitly, his hope. He has essentially one friend, a cat, and one hope--that future generations will appreciate and need the heritage he's striving to preserve. Wish him luck.

RED ALERT FOR ROMANIA is a seductive adventure novel set during the Cold War. It is built according to all the rules of the genre: seismologists involved in the series of events caused by the collapse of a Soviet military satellite, secret services engaged in tough operations to recover the module containing the military codes of the satellite, double agents... But the adventure, although exciting, is only a pretext that motivates the foray into a sick world - Romania before the Revolution of December 1989. The epilogue of the novel brings us to Romania after 1989 whose continuities suffocate changes, revealing their fragility. Professor Dr. Silviu ANGELESCU University of Bucharest

RED ALERT FOR ROMANIA is, apparently, a seductive adventure novel, built according to all the rules of the genre: seismologists involved in the series of events caused by the collapse of a Soviet military satellite, secret services engaged in tough operations to recover the satellite's remote-control code, double agents... But the adventure, although captivating, is only a pretext that motivates the foray into a sick world - Romania before 1989, in the last period of Ceauşescu's communist dictatorship. The novel's epilogue brings us to Romania after 1989 whose continuities suffocate changes, revealing their fragility. Professor Dr. Silviu ANGELESCU University of Bucharest The dynamism of the action, the unadorned style, the snappy dialogue throughout the novel, make RED ALERT FOR ROMANIA an attractive and very accessible read. Beyond genre fiction, the novel can be considered a valuable document of the totalitarian communist era in Eastern Europe, which was an unfortunate social experiment and an accident of history, that Humanity must never repeat. Ioana VARGA Professor of Literature

The Last Winter describes the agony of a researcher and, broadly speaking, of the honest Romanian intelligentsia, in the muddled period that followed the overturn of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in late 1989. The deprivations that politicians imposed on the Romanian public for the sake of an ambivalent switch to the market economy and delusive future welfare took a serious toll on the country. The lead character, a researcher, found himself caught between two ostensibly different worlds that hardly differed in reality, insofar as they were products of the same clique of politicians that only paid lip service to Eastern Europe's political U-turn of the 1990s. Persecuted under the Communist regime, the character has trouble adjusting to the mock capitalism that follows. His is a self- denying struggle for preserving the fundamental values of humankind embodied by the endangered library-that of his own research institute and its symbolic counterpart, Assurbanipal's famous library in Nineveh. The researcher is killed while unsuccessfully trying to save the former but compensates by saving the latter in his dying hour's visions-a silver lining to this gloomy ending as the author believes that fundamental values will eventually prevail.