Velvet Totalitarianism: Post-Stalinist Romania

(University Press of America) This novel is about the members of a Romanian family living through their country’s totalitarian regime in a post-Stalinist world. The author brings together two storylines, one of Radu, a Romanian citizen caught and controlled by the secret police, the other of his sister Irina, who immigrates to the United States and attends Princeton University. Moscovici is a Romania-American writer who has published short fiction in literary magazines and scholarly books on Romantic art and literature. She personally lived through totalitarianism as a child growing up in Romania under the Nicolae Ceausecu regime, and many of her own experiences enter into the novel.