The long-awaited new novel by the great storyteller Catalin D. Florescu circles around a timeless question: when is a human being truly free? Matei grows up in the vibrant Bucharest of the 1930s, but under dictatorship his family loses everything. Sentenced to forced labour in the Danube Delta for his political poems, he is later pardoned, yet unable to find true peace. Years later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Matei recognises «handsome Pană», former interrogation officer, on a bus. In that moment, he resolves to finally confront the ghosts of his past. A novel of striking imagery, it tells of the enduring tragedy of Eastern Europe – a story that echoes into the present.