《The Appointment》

From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life

"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.

Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.

Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceaucescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. She has won the IMPAC Award for her novel The Land of Green Plums , and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. "I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, she thinks over the events and people of her life under terror. In her distraction she misses her stop and finds herself alone on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale in comparison. "Powerful , , , Muller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman's desire to remain human in an inhuman system." Newsday "A slim, masterfully written tale." Newsweek "A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu." The New York Times "Powerful , , , Muller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman’s desire to remain human in an inhuman system." Newsday "Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams." San Francisco Chronicle "With terse poetry, Müller brings to life a profoundly moving world . . . the lyrical beauty of the prose and its unflinching moral and emotional honesty carry the reader." Bookforum