Books Set in Romania: Romanian Novels

I’ve just returned from a trip to Romania, where we spent a some time exploring the sprawling city of Bucharest, driving through the mountains into Transylvania and spending a few days in Brasov. As always, I took some books set in Romania to accompany me on my travels. These are my literary finds. 🇷🇴

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Books Set In Romania: Overview

The following list of books set in Romania spans from classics through to contemporary literature, and includes a wide variety of genres. Romania has a turbulent history, and these stories reflect that.

The list of books set in Romania includes titles from notable authors such as Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco and Norman Manea. However, many great works are yet to be translated to English; including titles by literary figures such as Zaharia Stancu, Marin Preda, George Călinescu and Mihail Sadoveanu. A selection of these are listed towards the end of the article, in the hopes that these will be translated some day.

My most recent read from this list of books set in Romania was written by Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Her novel The Appointment provides insight into life under the repressive regime of Ceaușescu.

And finally, if you are planning a trip to Bucharest, be sure to visit two incredible bookstores; the beautiful Cărturești Carusel and Librăria Humanitas de la Cişmigiu (a branch of the most successful publishing house in Romania).

Please note: this list does not currently include poetry, of which Romania has an abundance.

Books Set In Romania: The Shortlist

If you’re short on time, here are some notable picks from the much longer list below:

1. Forest Of The Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu, 1922
2. The Accident by Mihail Sebastian, 1940
3. Wasted Morning by Gabriela Adameșteanu, 1983
4. The Forgotten by Elie Wiesel, 1989
5. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, 2005
6. Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu, 2008
7. The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, 2009
8. Burying the Typewriter: A Memoir by Carmen Bugan, 2012

Books Set in Romania

1. The Castle of the Carpathians by Jules Verne, 1892

In a remote village cut off from the outside world by the dark mountains of Transylvania, the townspeople have come to suspect that supernatural forces must be responsible for the menacing apparitions emanating from the castle looming over them. But a visiting young count scoffs at their fears. He vows to liberate the villagers by pitting his reason against the forces of superstition – until he sees his dead beloved walking the halls of the castle…
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2. Dracula by Bram Stoker, 1897

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client’s castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly succumbs to a mysterious, wasting illness, her blood drained away; and the lunatic Renfield raves about the imminent arrival of his ‘master’. In the ensuing battle of wills between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries – led by the intrepid vampire hunter Abraham van Helsing – Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
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3. Forest Of The Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu, 1922

During the First World War, just behind the eastern front, there was a forest, where Austrians and Hungarians used to hang deserters. To this place came Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer eager to serve his country. Born in a Romanian region of Transylvania which was then under Hungarian rule, he had naturally enough joined the Austro-Hungarian army. But soon Romania itself entered the war, and Bologa found himself fighting his own people. The Forest of the Hanged asks a fundamental question about war: namely, why does a man fight?
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4. Kyra Kyralina by Panaït Istrati, 1924

Kyra Kyralina, upon publication early in the nineteen twenties, immediately established its author as a leading writer in the Modernist pantheon. The first volume in a series of volumes indebted to Oriental modes of storytelling, such as found in The Thousand and One Nights, Kyra Kyralina is a book of great charm and profound insight into the human condition.
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5. For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian, 1934

‘Absolutely, definitively alone’, a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn’t belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him.
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6. They Were Counted (The Transylvania Trilogy #1) by Miklós Bánffy, 1934

Painting an unrivalled portrait of the vanished world of pre-1914 Hungary, this story is told through the eyes of two young Transylvanian cousins, Count Balint Abady and Count Laszlo Gyeroffy. Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament, and the luxury of life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality.
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7. Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher, 1936

Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of “irreality” that plagued him in his youth: eerie and unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, frightening, and exhilarating awakenings of a young man.
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8. Miss Christina (Domnişoara Christina) by Mircea Eliade, 1936

Mircea Eliade’s fantasy novel Miss Christina deals with the fate of an eccentric family of the Moscus, who are haunted by the ghost of a brutally assassinated aristocrat known as Christina. When two guests, Egor Paschevici, a painter, and Mr. Nazarie, a professor of history, are invited to spend some time in the country, it is not long before Christina comes back from the grave in the shape of a blood-devouring vampire or strigoi, to stalk the living. Her elder niece, Sanda, is attacked first, but shortly thereafter, Simina, Sanda’s younger sister, falls a prey to the ghoul’s powerful magnetism.
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9. The Accident by Mihail Sebastian, 1940

A love story set in the Bucharest art world of the 1930s and the Transylvanian mountains, it is a deeply romantic, enthralling tale of two people who meet by chance. Along snowy ski trails and among a mysterious family in a mountain cabin, Paul and Nora, united by an attraction that contains elements of repulsion, find the keys to their fate.
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10. Embers by Sándor Márai, 1942

In a secluded woodland castle an old General prepares to receive a rare visitor, a man who was once his closest friend but who he has not seen in forty-one years. Over the ensuing hours host and guest will fight a duel of words and silences, accusations and evasions. They will exhume the memory of their friendship and that of the General’s beautiful, long-dead wife.
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11. The Great Fortune (Balkan Trilogy #1) by Olivia Manning, 1960

Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married, arrive in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939. The city they find is one of contrasts and rumours, on the edge with wavering loyalties and the tension of war, peopled with an international cast of characters, including the inimitable and eccentric Russian émigré Prince Yakimov. Note: The other titles in this trilogy are: The Spoilt City and Friends and Heroes.
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12. In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires by Raymond T. McNally, 1972

Until recently most people thought Dracula was a creation of film and fiction. When an earlier version of this book was published over two decades ago, it was hailed as a ground-breaking work, rediscovering as it did the actual historical figure of Prince Vlad of Transylvania – better known as Vlad the Impaler – and thus introducing to the reader one of the darkest figures of Eastern European history and folklore.
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13. The Hermit by Eugène Ionesco, 1973

In his only novel, the celebrated dramatist has chosen as his main character a man who is both utterly banal yet strangely touched with grace, a lowly clerk who is none-the-less prey to luminous visions. At 35 he quits the “rat-race” thanks to an unexpected inheritance and devotes himself to his secret passion: observing and meditating on the human condition. “It may well be” wrote the French critic François Nourissier in Le Point, “that in a few years we will come to realize that The Hermit is one of the essential works of our time, probing and detailing the illness of our century.
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14. Vain Art of the Fugue by Dumitru Țepeneag, 1973

Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he’s on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recurs in remarkably different variations in Vain Art of the Fugue. In one version, the bus driver ignores the traffic signals and is killed in the ensuing crash. In another, the protagonist is thrown off the bus, and as he chases after it, a crowd of strangers joins him in the pursuit. As the book unfolds, the protagonist, his lovers, and the people he meets become increasingly vivid and complex figures in the crowded Bucharest cityscape.
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15. The Dean’s December by Saul Bellow, 1982

Albert Corde, dean of a Chicago college, is unprepared for the violent response to his expose of city corruption. Accused of betraying his city, as well as being a racist, he journeys to Bucharest, where his mother-in-law lies dying, only to find corruption rife in the Communist capital. Switching back and forth between the two cities, The Dean’s December represents Bellow’s “most spirited resistance to the forces of our time” (Malcolm Bradbury).
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16. Nadirs by Herta Müller, 1982

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Müller’s childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a childs often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state. 
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17. Wasted Morning (Dimineaţă Pierdută) by Gabriela Adameșteanu, 1983

Upon its original publication in 1983, Wasted Morning catapulted Gabriela Adamesteanu to the first rank of Romanian novelists. At the center of Wasted Morning is Vica Delca, a simple, poor woman in her seventies who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century.
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18. The Passport by Herta Müller, 1986

The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of life in the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany.
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19. Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon, 1987

The world is on the brink of mutual destruction between the East and the West and Mary Ashley, beautiful, talented, intelligent, has been chosen to represent America as Ambassador to Romania. Thrust from her comforting, homely life in Kansas, she finds herself lost amongst the political turmoil in a foreign country where she is seen as the enemy and no-one is to be trusted.
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20. Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu, 1989

Readers opening the pages of Nostalgia should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children’s games, the music of the spheres, humankind’s primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.
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21. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent by Mircea Eliade, 1989

The short-sighted adolescent is a passionate reader who takes various cultural figures as models, trying to emulate both their lives or their works. The pupil protagonist is a poor student, who likes science and reads a lot of books, sometimes staying up all night to do so. At the age of 17, he decides to write a novel to demonstrate to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his other classmates, and that he is prepared to give up everything he holds dear in order to do so.
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22. The Forgotten by Elie Wiesel, 1989

A profoundly moving novel about a Holocaust survivor’s struggle to remember both the heroic and the shameful events of his past, and about his American-born son’s need to assimilate his father’s life into his own. “A book of shattering force that offers a message of urgency to a world under the spell of trivia and the tyranny of amnesia.” Chicago Tribune Book World.
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23. Children of the Night by Dan Simmons, 1992

In a desolate orphanage in post-Communist Romania, a desperately ill infant is given the wrong blood transfusion—and flourishes rather than dies.  For immunologist Kate Neuman, the infant’s immune system may hold the key to cure cancer and AIDS. Kate adopts the baby and takes him home to the States. But baby Joshua holds a link to an ancient clan and their legendary leader – Vlad Tşepeş, the original Dracula – whose agents kidnap the child. Against impossible odds and vicious enemies Kate and her ally, Father Mike O’Rourke, steal into Romania to get her baby back.
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24. The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller, 1994

Set in Romania at the height of Nicolae Ceausescu’s reign of terror, this haunting novel tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of better prospects in the city. It is a profound and powerful look at a totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to the extent that everyone, even the most strongest, must either bend to the oppressors, or resist them and perish.
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25. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca, 1995

Isabel Fonseca describes the four years she spent with Gypsies from Albania to Poland, listening to their stories, deciphering their taboos, and befriending their matriarchs, activists, and child prostitutes. A masterful work of personal reportage, this volume is also a vibrant portrait of a mysterious people and an essential document of a disappearing culture.
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26. Hotel Europa by Dumitru Țepeneag, 1996

The author-narrator, a sarcastic Romanian émigré with a French wife, tells with great insight and humor the story of a young student’s life and education as he passes from post-Ceausescu Romania through an unwelcoming Western Europe beset with dangerous problems of its own. Sex-and drug-traffickers are only one part of the strange and paranoid world in which the student and his fellow-countrymen become entangled, while the author’s past—in the form of post-communist gangsters—begins to catch up with him in his retreat in rural France.
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27. Blinding (Orbitor #1) by Mircea Cărtărescu, 1996

Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the jazz underworld of New Orleans, and the installation of the Communist regime. 
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28. The Appointment by Herta Müller, 1997

“I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.” Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu’s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
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29. The Seamstress by Sara Tuvel Bernstein, 1997

From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein’s tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father’s orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher’s vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him.
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30. Laundry by Suzane Adam, 2000

In 1960s Transylvania where the novel begins, five-year-old Ildiko becomes victim to psychological abuse at the hands of her babysitter, Yutzi, whom she worships and follows everywhere. Though Ildiko’s family immigrates to Israel soon after, Ildiko’s life continues to be shaped by the secret deep within her; not until many years later is Ildiko able to reveal her story. In flashback fashion, she recounts her horror to her worried husband, who at the novel’s start is nearly hysterical with worry about a recent mysterious and possibly violent incident. Only as Ildiko’s story unfolds—and with it the parallel stories of her family and her husband—do readers come to understand what has taken place and how Ildiko’s story has come full circle.
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31. The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir by Norman Manea, 2003

The Hooligan’s Return is Norman Manea’s long-awaited memoir, a portrait of an artist that ranges freely from his early childhood in prewar Romania to his return there in 1997. In October 1941, the entire Jewish population of Manea’s native Bukovina was deported to concentration camps. Manea was among them, a child at the time, and his family spent four years there before they were able to return home.
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32. The Encounter by Gabriela Adameșteanu, 2003

Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languages, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.
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33. Why We Love Women by Mircea Cărtărescu, 2004

Cartarescu brings together twenty short stories that he wrote for Elle magazine. The protagonist of every story is female, but they are not individual portraits of women – it is a group portrait of womanhood.
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34. I’m an Old Commie! (Sînt o babă comunistă!) by Dan Lungu, 2004

Emilia, a pensioner in northern Romania, is forced to confront the nostalgic illusions she nurtures as a reaction to the grim post-communist present when her daughter, now living in Canada, telephones urging her not to vote for the former communists in upcoming elections. Determined to discover in her own mind why ‘things were better back then,’ she explores her memories of growing up in an impoverished village and of her life as a factory worker in the town. But ironic tension grows as the reader glimpses between the lines how nothing was what it seemed in Ceaușescu’s Romania.
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35. Little Fingers by Filip Florian, 2005

In a little town in Romania, a mass grave is discovered near the excavations of a Roman fort. Are the dead the victims of a medieval plague or, perhaps, of a Communist firing squad? And why are finger bones disappearing from the pit each night? Petrus, a young archaeologist, decides to do some investigating of his own.
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36. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, 2005

Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to “My dear and unfortunate successor”. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history.
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37. The White King (A Fehér Király) by György Dragomán, 2005

An international sensation, this startling and heartbreaking debut introduces us to precocious eleven-year-old Djata, whose life in the totalitarian state he calls home is about to change forever. Djata doesn’t know what to make of the two men who lead his father away one day, nor does he understand why his mother bursts into tears when he brings her tulips on her wedding anniversary. He does know that he must learn to fill his father’s shoes, even though among his friends he is still a boy: fighting with neighborhood bullies, playing soccer on radioactive grass, having inappropriate crushes, sneaking into secret screening rooms, and shooting at stray cats with his gun-happy grandfather. 
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38. The Băiuț Alley Lads by Filip Florian and Matei Florian, 2006

Two brothers, Filip and Matei, are growing up in a totalitarian society. Every day life is recounted through their young eyes. Their story is one of childish naïvety set against a backdrop of life imposed by communism. Their world is filled with characters from children’s television, broadcast by the official communist media, alongside magazines and cinema.
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39. Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier, 2006

High in the Transylvanian woods, at the castle Piscul Draculi, live five daughters and their doting father. It’s an idyllic life for Jena, the second eldest, who spends her time exploring the mysterious forest with her constant companion, a most unusual frog. But best by far is the castle’s hidden portal, known only to the sisters. Every Full Moon, they alone can pass through it into the enchanted world of the Other Kingdom. There they dance through the night with the fey creatures of this magical realm.
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40. The Days of the King by Filip Florian, 2008

Joseph Strauss leaves Prussia in the spring of 1866 and follows a captain of dragoons to Bucharest, where the officer is to ascend the throne as prince of the United Principalities of Romania. War is imminent in central Europe, but the company of a special tomcat, a guardian angel of sorts, helps him to overcome all dangers. In Bucharest, Joseph will meet and fall in love with an attractive nanny, while the prince distances himself from the dentist, seeking to erase all stains from his past, particularly his involvement with a beautiful blind prostitute.
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41. Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu, 2008

An incandescent love story—a thrilling debut novel—that moves from Romania to America, from the Carpathian Mountains to Chicago, from totalitarianism to freedom, and from passionate infatuation to profound understanding. In the summer of 1977, seventeen-year-old Mona Manoliu falls in love with Mihai, a mysterious, green-eyed boy who lives in Brasov, the romantic mountain city where she spends her summers. She can think of nothing, and no one, else. But life under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu is difficult. Hunger and paranoia infect everyone; fear, too. And one day, Mona sees Mihai wearing the black leather jacket favored by the secret police. Could he be one of them?
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42. Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Pârvulescu, 2009

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. The stories of the various characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. 
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43. Along The Enchanted Way: A Romanian Story by William Blacker, 2009

When William Blacker first crossed the snow-bound passes of northern Romania, he stumbled upon an almost medieval world. There, for many years he lived side by side with the country people, a life ruled by the slow cycle of the seasons, far away from the frantic rush of the modern world. In spring as the pear trees blossomed he ploughed with horses, in summer he scythed the hay meadows and in the freezing winters gathered wood by sleigh from the forest. From sheepfolds harried by wolves, to courting expeditions in the snow, he experienced the traditional way of life to the full, and became accepted into a community who treated him as one of their own. But Blacker was also intrigued by the Gypsies, those dark, foot-loose strangers of spellbinding allure who he saw passing through the village.
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44. The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller, 2009

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.
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45. Black Sea Twilight by Domnica Radulescu, 2010

1980s Romania. As the sun sets on the shore of the Black Sea, all Nora Teodoru can think about is pursuing her dream of becoming an artist and of her love for Gigi, her childhood friend from the Turkish part of town. But storm clouds are gathering as life under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu becomes unbearable.
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46. Kafka’s House by Gabriela Popa, 2012

Ten-year-old Silvia Marcu lives in the magical world of fairy tales, sheltered from the traumatic events Romania goes through during the sixties. As the events of 1968 unfold, she is assailed by questions no one, not even her parents, can answer. With imagination and candor, Silvia embarks on a miraculous journey that reveals that the ordinary people around us hold the key to our most puzzling questions.
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47. The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, 2011

Once the gleaming “Paris of the East,” Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Old landmarks are falling to demolition crews, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere. Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He is taken under the wing of Leo O’Heix, a colleague and master of the black market, and falls for the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, friendships are compromised, and loyalty is never absolute.
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48. Burying the Typewriter: A Memoir by Carmen Bugan, 2012

Carmen Bugan grew up amid the bounty of the Romanian countryside on her grandparent’s farm where food and laughter were plentiful. But eventually her father’s behavior was too disturbing to ignore. He wept when listening to Radio Free Europe, hid pamphlets in sacks of dried beans, and mysteriously buried and reburied a typewriter. When she discovered he was a political dissident she became anxious for him to conform. However, with her mother in the hospital and her sister at boarding school, she was alone, and helpless to stop him from driving off on one last, desperate protest.
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49. Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding, 2012

1948. A man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. Wet with morning dew, he is as frail as a fallen bird and utters no words. It is days before anyone realises that he is deaf and mute. The ward sister, Adriana, whose son still has not returned from the war in Russia, sits at the man’s bedside and whispers to him, keeping herself company. But it is a young nurse called Safta who thinks to bring paper and pencils with which he might draw. 
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50. Matei Brunul by Lucian Dan Teodorovici, 2018

The year is 1959, one of the darkest periods of Romanias communist regime. Political prisoner Bruno Matei, a puppeteer of Italian ancestry, has been released from jail a broken man, suffering from amnesia. An uneasy relationship forms between Matei Brunul and Bojin, the secret policeman who keeps him under constant surveillance. Gradually, the secret police will try to remould Matei’s mind by rewriting his past, turning the puppeteer into a puppet of the new totalitarian order. In parallel, a harrowing second narrative reveals Matei’s prison experiences: the story of an innocent man physically and mentally crushed by the totalitarian system, which explodes the manipulative fictions of the secret police one by one.
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Books Set in Romania: To Be Translated

Some other notable works written in Romanian, that I’ve not yet found translated into English:

1920 Ion by Liviu Rebreanu
1933 Patul lui procust (The Bed of Procrustes) by Camil Petrescu
1938 Enigma otiliei (Otilia’s Riddle) by George Călinescu
1948 Desculţ (Barefoot) by Zaharia Stancu
1955 Moromeții (The Moromete Family) by Marin Preda
1978 Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest) by Mircea Eliade
1980 Cel mai iubit dintre pământeni (The Most Beloved of Earthlings) by Marin Preda
1994 Baltagul (The Hatchet) by Mihail Sadoveanu
2000 Muzici si faze (Musics and Tricks) by Ovidiu Verdes
2000 Sexagenara si tânărul (The Sixty-Year-Old Woman and the Young Man) by Nora Iuga
2004 Cum mi-am petrecut vacanța de vară (How I Spent My Summer Holiday) by T.O. Bobe
2006 Fata din casa vagon (The Girl from the Wagon House) by Ana Maria Sandu
2012 Toate bufnițele (All the Owls) by Filip Florian
2015 Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

What do you think of these books set in Romania?

Have some great books set in Romania that should be added to this list? Are you visiting Romania soon? Do you call Romania home? Have any travel tips for readers visiting? I’d love to hear about more about your tips for books set in Romania in the comments below!

Looking for more reading ideas?

If you’re looking for more books set around Europe, see some of these popular posts:

• Books Set in France: French Novels
• Books Set in Germany: German Novels
• Books Set in Spain: Spanish Novels
• Books Set in Scandinavia: Scandinavian Books
• Books Set in Scotland: Scottish Novels