Burying the Typewriter : Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police

‘A modern classic’ – The Sunday Times

‘This story starts roughly in the 1970s, a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my father’s codename was already long established as “Andronic”, a name we learned about only last summer . . .’

Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one teenage girl’s flight from the Romanian secret police and the Ceausescu regime.

At 2 a.m. on 10 March 1983, Carmen Bugan’s father left the family home, alone. That afternoon, Carmen returned from school to find officers of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, in her living room. Her father had been detained for his protests against the Communist regime in Romania, and the family home was now laced with surveillance devices. Overnight, Carmen’s life became a living hell of paranoia and small-scale resistance, her schoolteachers and the friends and neighbours all around her transformed into potential informants.

Burying the Typewriter is the extraordinary story of Carmen’s coming of age in the twilight years of Ceausescu’s rule. Above all, it is a luminous, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.