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Novel, Prose series, Cartea Romaneasca, 2015, 296 pages

Copyright: Cartea Romaneasca

Translation rights sold to: All rights available

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Radu Anghel studies clarinet at the Music Lycee in the Big City, which was once a Franciscan monastery. Surprisingly, however, the boarding school, a fascinating world in miniature, is not only a place of camaraderie and schoolboy pranks, but also the scene of terrible murder, of which Anghel is wrongly found guilty and sent to prison. His experiences in prison fundamentally change his life, depriving him of what would have been an exceptional musical career and plunging him into a vortex of dramatic events with an unexpected ending.

The Blackbird is a vivid, passionate story about life’s beauty and unpredictability, not only a captivating Bildungsroman, but a book about the senses above all else. Cinematographic and ingeniously constructed, a fabric of sounds and images, smells and colours, the novel depicts an apparently ordinary world, which aesthetic joy transforms into a spectacle. Above all these slices of life sits Dodo the raven, the boarding school’s mascot, the “blackbird.” It does not cry “nevermore”, like Poe’s raven, but rather imitates authorial voices, like a painstaking storyteller.

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