Longlisted for the Booker prize, this thriller about the end of the the Soviet era is by a poet who draws on his own experience as an English language teacher in Ceaucescu's Romania in the late 1980s. The unnamed narrator goes over to work in a Romanian university, only to find himself snarled up in the juddering engines of a dying dictatorship. Strung between the daughter of a party apparatchik, dissident people-smugglers and rogue academics, the unnamed narrator struggles to keep a sense of reality in a world that is increasingly and scarily surreal. Read reviews of The Last Hundred Days