The Appointment

The winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.'

So begins one day in the life of a young clothing factory worker during Ceausescu'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, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.

Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Muller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's Secret Police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the European Literature Prize, she also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel, The Land of Green Plums (published by Granta). Muller is also the author of The Passport (published by Profile Books).