The author is Paul Kenyon, a journalist for the BBC, who has been going to Romania since his first assignment in 1994. He was sent there to investigate the post-revolution trade in babies but says he felt at home in Bucharest. He met his future wife soon after he arrived and walked with her through the deserted streets. Gypsy musicians were playing Brahms’s Hungarian Rhapsody at the old Baroque mansion where they met and he was trying to meet the British Ambassador for an interview.
I am drawn to this well-written book to learn about this relatively unknown country! I am going there in late September and thought I would post here about the book.
I will leave you with this quote from the Introduction. “And yet here, on the terraces of the baroque villa, I found a pocket of old-world Romanian sophistication, a glimpse into the true essence of the country; exotic, daring, cosmopolitan, a crossroads between East and West, a kaleidoscopic mix of cultures and ethnicities whose most ancient peoples could trace their blood back to Ancient Rome.” Page XVIII.