The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The Nobel Laureate's "atmospheric, lyrical" novel of surviving Communist Romania: "An essential work of post–Iron Curtain literature" (Kirkus, starred review).

Romania, the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on all of the group.

One day Adina discovers that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it's the hind leg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police—the fox was ever the hunter.

Crystalline images build into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world of complicity and fear, where it's hard to tell victim from perpetrator. 

With prose "as poetic as it is blunt", Herta Müller creates a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of totalitarianism "in this dark collage, which glints with fear—and with beauty" (The Atlantic).