The Village on the Edge of the World
Writing and Surviving Ceausescu's Romania
Herta Muller author Kate McNaughton translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Granta Books
Published:7th May '26
Should be back in stock very soon
A remarkably candid and discomfiting interview with the Nobel Prize laureate, reflecting on a literary life defined by the brutality of Ceaucescu's regime.
From her childhood in Romania, in a village 'as small as a thimble on the edge of the world', through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory and trauma, and on what it was to live and write during Ceausescu's regime: on the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; on the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism. The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century - and how they remain with us in the twenty-first.
A vivid reflection on life and literature * FT *
Certain to be brilliant * New Statesman *
A profound delight. In this seemingly casual tour inside the mind of one of the century's great writers there are frequent, electrifying moments of immense insight - each one feels like a trapdoor opening into a reality you realise you were, till now, just skimming the surface of. Müller's thinking is glorious to share in, and her thoughts have never been more relevant -- Anna Funder
Müller is an unnervingly acute observer and the account here of the nightmarish texture of persecution is equal in its intensity to any in fiction... The Village on the Edge of the World is an autobiographical work of rare and unsettling honesty, an extraordinary and uncompromising telling of an extraordinary and uncompromising life * Literary Review *
Superb... Müller articulates well the pain and anxiety she suffered as an enemy of the state. It's heartening to learn how she regained her strength and found ways, however small, to stand up to the Securitate -- (Five stars) * Telegraph *
ISBN: 9781783788170
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages