Books which have the word, "Romania" in their titles need in this reader's experience, to be approached with extreme caution - many of them have turned out, in the recent past, to be disappointing exercises in eccentricity and/or self indulgence. This one begins in unpromising fashion with a description of a rather silly holiday flirtation between the author and a poetry stricken Romanian youth in the late 1970s. Safely back in England, Helena Drysdale regarded her Romanian romance with mild, embarrassment, particularly when her suitor persisted in writing ever more impassioned letters in which he veered from proposals of marriage to criticism of the Ceausescu regime. Abruptly the letters stopped, prompting". Drysdale by now married to someone else to go back and search for him. And so began a trail which led her, not to the unfortunate George (who had, she swiftly discovered, breathed his last amid the horrific conditions of a lunatic asylum in the Carpathians) but to the rotten soul of Romania itself. She writes well she refuses to embroider or romanticise; her story is unforgettable.
