The land of green plums

Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends - teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance - betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish. Herta Muller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience.