My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest
Goma, Paul
The great Romanian writer's tenth novel - his only work in English - is a Proustian feast of memory and experience centering on young Paul and his family, who live through World War II in circumstances sadly familiar today, where a remote village is swept up in fighting between rival armies, one of them ... Russian. The boy's father, a fiercely idealistic teacher but a bungling family man, is deported to Siberia, leaving Mother to take charge ...