The Last Hundred Days
Patrick McGuinness
The Last Hundred Days
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows. In The Last 100 Days, Patrick McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time and place as the city struggles to survive this intense moment in history. He evokes a world of extremity and ravaged beauty from the viewpoint of an outsider uncomfortably, and often dangerously, close to the eye of the storm as the regime of 1980s Romania crumbles to a bloody end.
3.5 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
356 |
| RRP |
£8.99 |
| Date of Publication |
June 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1854115416 |
| Publisher |
Seren |
| |
The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows. In The Last 100 Days, Patrick McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time and place as the city struggles to survive this intense moment in history. He evokes a world of extremity and ravaged beauty from the viewpoint of an outsider uncomfortably, and often dangerously, close to the eye of the storm as the regime of 1980s Romania crumbles to a bloody end.
Reviews
The Independent
Richard Gwyn
“McGuinness is an accomplished poet and writes with superb clarity. The novel is littered with aperçus that have the reader reaching for a pencil.”
08/09/2011
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The Observer
James Purdon
“… the unrest of 80s England bleeds into the margins: tanks in Piata Republica or the Wapping riots? Elena Ceausescu's handbag, or Margaret Thatcher's? This is not the sort of novel to force such alignments into congruence but they link The Last Hundred Days to a wider European experience outside the communist enclave of Bucharest.”
14/08/2011
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Times Literary Supplement
Sean O'Brien
“The Last Hundred Days is an ambitious work, at ease with intimacy as well as with the sudden eruption of crowd scenes as the regime disintegrates and re-forms itself. It manages to be both funny and horrifying, sceptical but not fatally poisoned by the encounter. Above all, the sardonic crispness and evocative power of its language distinguish it from the run of contemporary fiction.”
12/08/2011
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The Spectator
Kathy O'Shaughnessy
“... even if there’s the odd creak, this first and Booker-longlisted novel is a wonderfully good read ... 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.”
27/08/2011
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The Literary Review
Paul Bailey
“The novel, then, is a hybrid - part history, part fiction. It is an assured performance, beyond doubt, but as an introduction to the recent woes of Romania it is often superficial.”
01/09/2011
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