A stormy love story where we find out what would happen if Nordic caution met Balkanic restlessness.

We’re reading what feels like the logbook of a researcher sent to help us understand the ways of the Northerners. In this travel dossier we find emails, invented words, secrets and testimonials, bits of playlists and heavy love letters that shimmer and radiate onto the surrounding pages. Lovers who become friends and vice versa offer a detailed scan of bonding and drifting apart, negotiating the optimal distance at which they can live together. A pleasant mix of fun and sadness, this is a slow coming-of-age journey, where the goal is not to find answers, but to ask better questions.

In a confessional tone, we find out that no one is truly safe, and that this sick kind of love can strike anywhere, anytime. The logic of dreams is invoked—not to decipher meanings, but to run possible scenarios, like a simulation where one might gain confidence. We move in small steps through a vast valley of emotions, at the bottom of which lies heavy empathy that swallows everything in a dense fog. Clarity is the mission, so every success and failure is tallied; each emotional state is catalogued encyclopedically, and great attention is paid to the precise weight of the feelings exchanged.

Published in a print run of 300 copies, each cover is unique, painted by a bunch of small rocks dipped in paint and rolled on paper. The text is written in Romanian.

An unusual book about life at 26, where love and friendship, freedom, indecision, self-doubt, vulnerability, nonchalance, the desire for adventure, and the poetry of everyday reality come together to create a story (not just with narrative threads!). Finally, a novel of youth for our times, about the zillennials (the microgeneration caught between millennials and Gen Z), who grew up with Chupa Chups lollipops, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld—a bit hikikomori, yet paradoxically open to new challenges, for whom it’s okay to be sad, but “dude, don’t be dumb!”

A book with cosmopolitan characters for whom “home means nothing more than this very second,” wherever that “second” may be—Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Sibiu—shared with all kinds of people, but in harmony with Oana (the protagonist’s name): a girl who reads, among others, the Dadaists, Peter Sloterdijk, and poems by g.d. (Gellu Naum); who listens on repeat to everything from Mazzy Star to The Microphones; who’s learning the “art of living” (in Marcel Duchamp’s words), and who takes to heart her grandmother’s advice: “life goes on, you don’t have to be well-behaved.” It’s one of the best debut novels of recent years.

- Simona Popescu