A beautiful and heartrending short novel that unfolds through the unanswered letters of a young girl to her absent parents, relaying lively tales of cruel pranks and jovial reconciliations, pain and tenderness, despair and hope of real-life young children who grow up alone.“In [Kinderland] Liliana Corobca has painstakingly examined…locations and territories that resemble Lord of the Flies… and has written a novel that is complicated and harsh, but also moving and full of candor.” —Observator CulturalWith her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village populated almost entirely with children and old people. Just as most of the inhabitants left their countryside and homes with the desire to earn a better income, their parents also went to the world for money, the mother to Italy, the father to Siberia, and the children were left to fend for themselves. Here the youth must learn to survive on their own, they grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.This follow-up to Liliana Corobca’s critically-acclaimed novel of censorship in eastern Europe, The Censor’s Notebook is a novel that deals with a painful true reality, which has over time grown to become a phenomenon: the lives and struggles of children left home alone by parents who have gone to work abroad.