New Novel by St Anne's Fellow

St Anne's Fellow Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Sir Win and Lady Bischoff Fellow in French, has published his first novel, The Last Hundred Days (Seren).

Professor McGuinness has previously published several collections of poetry; The Canals of Mars (2004, Carcanet), 19th Century Blues (2007, HappenStance), and Jilted City (2010, Carcanet). He has won the Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, and the Poetry Business Prize in 2006. The launch of The Last Hundred Days took place at St Anne's on Weds 22nd June.

Details of his new novel are available on the Seren website:

"An intricately plotted literary thriller about Ceausescus last hundred days in power, from an author who was a first-hand witness to the regime.

Set during Ceausescu's last hundred days in power, Patrick McGuinness's accomplished debut novel explores a world of danger, repression and corruption.

When our narrator, a young English student with a damaged past and an uncertain future, arrives in Bucharest he finds himself in a job he never applied for. With duties that become increasingly ambiguous and precarious, he soon finds himself uncomfortably and often dangerously close to the eye of the storm. He learns, as he goes, the uncertainty of friendships in a surveillance society: friendships that are compromised and riddled with danger and duplicity. He encounters dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-markerteers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, their lives all intertwined against a background of severe poverty and repression as Europe's most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.

The socialist state is in stasis, the shops are empty and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the onslaught of Ceaucescu’s demolition gangs. Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk in the shadows."