Blinding: The Left Wing - Penguin International Writers by Mircea Cartarescu, Sean Cotter (translator)

'Visionary... almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

'This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment' Chris Power, Observer

An enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe’s most celebrated novelists

‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’

Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards.

Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.