Miriam Balanescu

Set in present-day Derry, Seamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama centres on the filming of a television series set in the 1980s. Monica Logue, a glamorous American actress and crime drama regular, has been cast as the lead, and residents are divided between apprehension and hoping she ‘would do for Troubles-era Derry what she’d already done for shops that sold satin gloves’. When Monica vanishes, the community is left to deal with the fallout and their feelings about the Troubles, known as ‘the bad old good old days’. Each section is narrated by a different townsperson – from the show’s historical adviser to a mural painter, the local witch to a clairvoyant taxi driver – all with their own ideas about what has become of ‘the woman always catching sex pests on TV’.

Before the 1989 revolution, Romania had seen nearly a century of polarisation – a fascist regime swiftly replaced by a communist one. In Blinding, Mircea Cartarescu’s first instalment of an ambitious, surrealist trilogy, that duality, along with other antagonisms central to existence, is represented by the motif of a butterfly. The novel was originally published in Romanian in 1996, and the title refers to the epiphany which, it’s suggested, can be achieved if life’s opposites are reconciled. We first meet the narrator, twentysomething Mircea, languishing in a squalid studio flat in Bucharest, his rapidly industrialising home city. He is writing his own ‘endless book’, his aim being absolute self-knowledge.