One quiet day when her mother was away from home, Carmen Bugan's father put on his best suit and drove into Bucharest to stage a one-man protest against Ceausescu. He had been typing pamphlets on an illegal typewriter and burying it in the garden each morning under his daughter's bedroom window.

This is the story of what happened to Carmen and her family, isolated and under surveillance in their beloved village home.

It is an intimate piece of our recent history, the testimony of an extraordinary childhood left abruptly behind.

Above all, it is a luminous, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.