Book Log 2017 #38: The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness

It's 1989, and a young British man takes job as a university lecturer in Bucharest. Two odd things about the job: he never interviewed for it, and he never graduated from university. It becomes clear when he arrives that his actual job is to front for another faculty member (also a Brit) whose main occupation is actually cataloging (and occasionally selling) bits of the old city before they are destroyed and rebuilt as part of the Ceausescu regime's modernization plan. 

As he settles into life in Romania, he quickly becomes enmeshed with disparate parts of its society. He falls in with a group of dissidents who smuggle people out. He becomes friends with a pre-Ceausescu figure who is writing a memoir about the party and corruption. He becomes romantically entangled with the daughter of a ministry official.  Managing these relationships becomes increasingly difficult, especially with the backdrop of a regime that is slowly losing its grip over the people.

The author actually lived in Bucharest during the fall of Ceausescu, and his experiences and details give the story additional depth, beyond the average book about life at the end of communism. It's a very interesting book about a very interesting (and fairly surreal) time.