The Last Hundred Days Patrick Mcguinness by Patrick Mcguinness 9781608199150, 1608199150, B007DDF17Y instant download after payment.

Set during a dictator’s last hundred days in power, Patrick McGuinness’ accomplished debut explores a world of danger, repression and corruption.

In 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu was still clinging on to power in Romania. But with blood on his hands, his grip was slipping. When a young English student arrives in Bucharest he soon finds himself uncomfortably close to the eye of the storm. He encounters dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-marketeers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, their lives intertwined against a background of severe poverty and repression, as Europe’s most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.

"There are shortcomings... the most interesting character after the city itself, disappears halfway; and Leo's pontifications... underscore the ironies too heavily. Still, the novel is stylish and of lasting value to readers interested in the twilight of the Eastern Bloc."  -  Publishers Weekly

"The prose is often workaday-thriller ('I slept late and woke in sunlight so hot the blood bubbled inside my eyelids'), some of the characters generic. But McGuinness has reacted to the city with a kind of poetic intensity, and his fictional world expresses this."  -  Spectator (UK)

Patrick McGuinness Born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He is a poet and Oxford academic – specialising in modernist literature – as well as a novelist. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales teaching French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.