'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."

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009
The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany.
Herta Muller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse,...