'I've been summoned. Thursday morning, ten sharp'. Thus begins the day in the life of a young factory work in Romania. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me' the notes say, with her name and address. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, she considers her life."

The finest essays of Nobel Prize winner Herta Muller, selected from twenty years of her fearless, intelligent, unsettling truth-telling in a life lived in opposition, courage, secrecy and uncertainty