Böcker av Mihail Sebastian

Thrown off the train for not having a ticket, Mona finds herself, alone, in a rural town at night. Although she is fashionably dressed, she has no money and nowhere to stay. Fortunately, the local schoolteacher, Marin, invites her to stay at his home while he sleeps over at a friend's place.However, an attraction soon develops. Marin, a keen astronomer, reveals that he has discovered a star which is not marked on any star chart. They share a wonderfully happy night together. But their idyll is soon shattered by the arrival of Mona's boyfriend, Grig. Will Mona choose to return to her old life in the city or settle for a quieter life with Marin?This play was a hit play in Romania at the time it was written and has subsequently been adapted for film in both France and Russia. Available for the first time in a new English translation by Gabi Reigh.ABOUT THE AUTHORMihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Braila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays. His novel For Two Thousand Years is a Penguin Modern Classic.ABOUT THE TRANSLATORGabi Reigh's translations and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today and The Fortnightly Review. She has won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was shortlisted for the Tom-Gallon Society of Authors short story award. She is currently engaged in a translation project called Interbellum Series focusing on works from the Romanian interwar period, including the poetry of Lucian Blaga.Introduction by Alex Boican Dr Alex Boican was born in Bucharest, Romania, and since 1990 has lived in the UK. He studied at Birkbeck College and University College London. He holds a PhD in Romanian literature from UCL, where he is currently a Teaching Fellow in Romanian Literature and Culture. His main interest is in contemporary novelistic representations of class and gender.

The lives of six women are linked to one man - Stefan Valeriu - and in these four connected stories, the lives of the women are opened up to this character. 'I love Sebastian for his lightness, for his wit' John Banville

A novel by the distinguished Romanian author translated into English for the first time and published in the UK.

'Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him. Mihail Sebastian's 1934 masterpiece, now translated into English for the first time, was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.