Shortlisted for: 2011 Costa First Novel Award

A young English student arrives in Bucharest to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are unclear. He soon finds himself uncomfortably, and often dangerously, close to the eye of the storm.

He learns the uncertainty of friendships in a surveillance society: friendships that are compromised and riddled with danger and duplicity. He encounters dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-marketeers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, their lives all intertwined against a background of severe poverty and repression as EuropeÂ’s most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.