This one was an impulse buy in Brussels Waterstones, where I had gone for something completely different. My eye was somehow caught by the grainy black and white cover photograph of a motorcade of large boxy black cars progressing through a wide urban boulevard. It seemed to me to be something to do with 1960s America, but turned out on closer inspection to be a scene from 1980s Romania, and to be a novel about the end of the communist bloc's most capriciously despotic regime (save perhaps Albania), that of Nicolae Ceausescu and, to an extent I came to appreciate, his pseudo-scientist and fellow head-case wife, Elena.
