Harrowing and illuminating account of the Romanian totalitarian rebellion.

Like many others, this is a regime I hadn't learned about, either through schooling or my own reading. Like Communist China or Russia, the human stories are what pull you into the history and horrors, and Sepetys does a superb job in showing us the conditions, the mental torture and the inhumanity of this particular place and time.

It's sick, when you look at it. A country of people all spying on each other. Family, friends, colleagues, forced to report on each other's activities for 'rewards' (i.e. not being thrown in prison, or for essential supplies). Cristian is 17 and living in totalitarian-controlled Romania when he finds himself 'outed' for an infraction, and told he too must become an informer.

He has lived his whole life under the regime of the Hero leader and his wife, living in ghetto-like housing, queueing for rationed (and minimal) food, yet it is only the potential reward of medicine for his grandfather dying from leukaemia that pushes him to accept.

Watching Cristian and his friends try to be teenagers while still turning on taps to hide their conversations, avoid bugged telephones and hide their illicit Coca Cola drinking in dark alleys, it's upsetting. A bittersweet smile came to my lips watching a group of adolescents crowd illegally into a living room to watch a dubbed copy of Die Hard.

Cristian's grandfather is the voice of reason, of the people, of the revolution, in almost every phrase he utters. Wise and old, you can see he knows he's going to get in trouble but is past caring and knows what is right and what is not. His influence on Cristian is explicit.

There is a lot to see - the effect of the regime on all members of a family, what happens when someone dies, how relationships can possibly spring up despite everything, what happens to friendships when tested... Cristian has sister, friend, potential girlfriend, he has those he is meant to spy on. We experience a full world of Romania.

And then we also see Revolution. It's not pretty. I actually teared up in the final third, it was horrific. Warning here: some fairly graphic scenes of violence ahead. But credit to the author, nothing is shied away from. Happy endings didn't really happen.

The author shares at the end her writing of the book, that many who lived through these times shared their stories and that these fed into her writing. It feels authentically captured, and I imagine many like myself will take the internet to research this for themselves and feel stunned it wasn't on their radar before now.

A piece of history in fiction, teenagers will empathise with those not so different from themselves but be forced to see what the world has done and continues to do when we allow this to happen.

Powerful, upsetting and very well written. For ages 14+ ideally.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.