Appointment - Herta Muller, Portobello Books Ltd

'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp'. So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and, to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. Bone-spare and intense, &quot,The Appointment&quot, is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.