Bored by religious instruction and painting lessons, a group of friends at a convent school spend their days dreaming of romance, fashion and the latest gramophone records. One by one, they give up their visions of adventure and submit to provincial life, marrying for money and status, like their mothers before them. Plain, jaundiced Lucretia, becomes the envy of her friends when Paul, a glamorous dandy proposes, but she hides a shocking secret that will destroy their marriage and expose them to scandal. Only Adriana Dunea, the most beautiful and talented girl in the school seems destined for happiness with her childhood sweetheart, Gelu. But everything changes when, on a trip to Bucharest, she meets Cello Viorin, a famous composer...

"No star deviates from its path..." Thrown off the train for not having a ticket, Mona finds herself, alone, in a rural town at night. Although she is fashionably dressed, she has no money and nowhere to stay. Fortunately, the local schoolteacher, Marin, invites her to stay at his home while he sleeps over at a friend's place. However, an attraction soon develops. Marin, a keen astronomer, reveals that he has discovered a star which is not marked on any star chart. They share a wonderfully happy night together. But their idyll is soon shattered by the arrival of Mona's boyfriend, Grig. Will Mona choose to return to her old life in the city or settle for a quieter life with Marin? This play was a hit play in Romania at the time it was written and has subsequently been adapted for film in both France and Russia. Available for the first time in a new English translation by Gabi Reigh. --Mihail Sebastian

The frustrated wife of a French-Tunisian plantation owner, a mysterious older woman, a world weary tomboy, an unhappy mistress, a Parisian factory worker destined for tragedy, an acrobat turned cabaret sensation - these are the women whose lives are linked by their relationship with one man - Stefan Valeriu. Divided into four separate stories connected by one man, Women takes us from Stefan's amorous entanglements at an Alpine lake resort, to his life in Bucharest and Paris, as each of the women in his life opens up new worlds for him. Women is a hymn to love in all its forms, romantic or platonic, sometimes reckless, often glorious and always, ultimately, ephemeral.

A gorgeous, tender modern classic about the complexities of love, with an introduction from the Booker-winning author John Banville Stefan Valeriu, a young Romanian student, holidays alone in the Alps, where he soon becomes entangled in romantic relationships with three different women who pass through his guesthouse. We follow Stefan after his return to Paris as he reflects on the women in his life, at times playing the lover, and at others observing shrewdly from the periphery. Women's four interlinked stories offer nuanced and deeply moving portraits of romantic relationships in all their complexity, from unrequited love and passionate affairs to tepid marriages of convenience. In light, elegant prose, Mihail Sebastian, widely regarded as the greatest Romanian writer of the 20th century, explores longing, otherness, empathy, and regret. 'His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation' Arthur Miller 'I love Sebastian's courage, his lightness, and his wit' John Banville 'Sebastian belongs in the pantheon of classic authors' New Statesman 'A minor masterpiece of voice, mood and emotion' Irish Times

Hailed as one of the most important portrayals of the dark years of Nazism, this powerful chronicle by the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian aroused a furious response in Eastern Europe when it was first published. A profound and powerful literary achievement, it offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew's diary, a reader's notebook, a music-lover's journal. Above all, it is an account of the rhinocerization of major Romanian intellectuals whom Sebastian counted among his friends, including Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran, writers and thinkers who were mesmerized by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's reactionary revolution. In poignant, unforgettable sequences, Sebastian follows the grinding progression of the machinery of brutalization and traces the historical context in which it developed. Despite the pressure of hatred and horror in the huge anti-Semitic factory that was Romania in the years of World War II, his writing maintains the grace of its perceptive and luminous intelligence.The legacy of a journalist, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian's Journal stands as one of the most important human and literary documents of the climate that preceded the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

'Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian's magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years' - Philippe Sands, Guardian Books of the Year A prescient interwar masterpiece, available in English for the first time 'Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him. Mihail Sebastian's 1934 novel was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a lucid, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.