The most recommended books about Romania

More than anything, this book put me in the shoes of a young person who has no idea how to know the difference between truth and lies. He doesn’t know who to trust. I was fully immersed in this terrifying world.

Šepetys made me feel what it was like to live during a dictatorship leading up to the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

I came away feeling profoundly grateful for my freedom and in awe of those who fought for theirs.

This novel, published in 1879, is set in Romania at the time of the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War. It is significant for its setting because it predates Dracula (1897) in being set in Romania (home of Transylvania). Nizet was a twenty-year-old Belgian woman who encountered Romanians in Paris who told her about how Russians had treated them during the war. Nizet created the character of Captain Vampire to represent how Russia acted like a vampire toward the Romanians, even though they were Russia’s allies. Captain Vampire’s behavior is shocking yet fascinating. As a critique of war, the novel is extremely relevant today given Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Personally, I am amazed by how a woman who never saw a battlefield could capture war’s essence so vividly.

A beautifully written account of an Englishman who ventures to rural Romania and ends up staying after he falls for a gypsy girl.

The author captures a seemingly idyllic, pastoral way of life and describes it with such grace that I was left longing to join him swinging a scythe in the hay meadows or sitting by a crackling wood stove after a day of splitting logs.

Although the book covers a period of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, the world Blacker documents could be from a century ago. It’s a moving, wistful, sometimes amusing, and eventually poignant account of a way of life that likely no longer exists; recommended for all arm-chair travellers or anyone with an interest in Romania.

Part spy novel, part historical fiction, this book tells the tale of a young Jewish boy who’s been deposited by his parents at the Hotel Palacio in Estoril for safekeeping during WWII, when the hotel was home to exiled European nobles and royalty, British and German spies. We meet the Polish pianist, Yan Paderewski; Ian Fleming, the British spy novelist and creator of James Bond; French writer and flyer Antoine de St. Exupery; the ex-king of Romania, Carol II, and his mistress Elena Lupescu, the woman for whom he renounced the crown. We’re privy to the goings-on at the Hotel via the lives of this cast of colourful characters in a way that’s reminiscent of the quirky movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

Another way to ease yourself into historical fiction is to start with books for young readers—like this gorgeous, compelling read set during the Communist regime’s fall in Romania in 1989. 

Our heroine is a young girl named Ileana who loves stories, even though stories can be dangerous (like the one that got her uncle arrested for criticizing the government). Afraid for her life, her parents send her to live with grandparents she’s never met—and still she gets caught up in the independence. 

I adored this book as an adult reader and—bonus!—it would be the perfect thing to co-read with a middle schooler or young teen if you’ve got one in your life. 

I read this magical, mystical novel on an airplane, and had to retrieve a spare t-shirt from my suitcase to sob into! A beautiful, heart-wrenching work about family history, memory, and the power of imagination, the story is narrated by a girl, Lena, who leads her village to imagining their way out of the reality of the Holocaust's horrors. For a time, the villagers are spared, even repaired, until the outside world presses its way in and the myths crack, then shatter.  

This book holds a dear place in my heart as it features delicious traditional recipes from my home country, Romania. It brings to life old recipes that embody Romania's historical multicultural influences. It includes unique and original recipes which you'll have a hard time finding elsewhere.

This book is nonfiction, so it’s about real people rather than fictional characters. I love this book because it gives a descriptive perspective on what was happening and what was going on in Nazi-occupied Germany and Poland during World War II, and the horrors of the concentration camps (mainly Auschwitz) that were built and used to kill everyone the nazis hated for whatever insane reasons they had.

I’ve always had an almost alarming interest in World War II. It was my favorite lesson from the history classes I’ve taken, and this book really put some of the evil things that were done during that time into perspective.

When she died in 1917, Dr. Elsie Inglis was given a memorial service in Westminster, with columns of press tributes to one of Scotland’s first women doctors, and the leader of WWI frontline hospitals staffed entirely by women. ‘Go home and be still,’ the male doctors said when she suggested it, so she went to the women’s suffrage societies for funds. Her doctors, nurses, orderlies, and ambulance drivers chanted ‘Go home and be still’ gleefully to each other under fire and on retreats with the allied army in France, Serbia, Romania, and Russia. Somehow, whatever the difficulty, if Dr. Inglis said it had to be done, it was. An inspirational leader and a truly remarkable woman.

This is simply one of the greatest reading experiences I’ve had in my life. This is literature of the highest order from a writer unsurprisingly spoken about in Nobel terms; it’s arguably the greatest novel published so far this century (translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter).

To summarize a plot would not do it any justice but maybe The New York Times came closest with “an endlessly strange study of existence and the longing to escape it.”

If you’re interested in any of the following: Surrealism, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, sublime nature writing, Philosophy, Mystery, bildungsroman, reverence to other great writers: Kafka, Borges, Bruno Schulz… humor, whimsy, depth… then you’re in for the largest of treats; there’s nothing that this book does not have.

At well over 600 pages it skips by, and I cannot wait to go back and read it again.