Patrick McGuinness is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University. His upbringing was international, in France, Belgium, Brittain, Venezuela, Iran. He was a student in Bucharest, Romania, during the 1980s where he became a witness to the declining days of the Ceausescu dictatorship which he has reimagined in this work of fiction with the aim of recreating its reality. McGuinness now resides in Caernarfon, Wales, and although he previously published acclaimed works of poetry and literary criticism, this present book is his debut novel.