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.

"Cartarescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult" - TLS

"One of the greatest literary adventurers in contemporary literature" - El Pais

"Gripping, impassioned, unexpected--the qualities that the best in literature possesses" - Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Fluidly translated by Sean Cotter… the book has a cinematic quality that we don’t so much read as drift through — as in an amusement park ride. What fantastic notion, or iteration of metamorphosing insect will pop out and regale us next? If you’re game for a mystical mind-bend, give Blinding a go" - The Los Angeles Review