Burying the Typewriter

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.

Review: "In "Burying the Typewriter", Carmen Bugan delivers neither a memoir of blame nor a hagiography. What she has drawn, within the story of her own childhood, is a complex portrait of an exasperating father, a man who happens to be a hero in the eyes of Amnesty International and the Western World, a hero in the service of a just cause. But, while he may be the driving force behind her story . . . it is her world that is revealed here, a world she was forced to leave behind and that she looks back on now with sorrow, pride, longing and rage."--Lynn Freed, Bakeless Prize judge

Prizes: Short-listed for The Orwell Prize 2013 (UK).