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Two brothers, Filip and Matei, are growing up in a totalitarian society. Every day life is recounted through their young eyes. Their story is one of childish naïvety set against a backdrop of life imposed by communism.
Their world is filled with characters from children’s television, broadcast by the official communist media, alongside magazines and cinema. 'Joe Lemonade', 'Giani Morandi', 'Rome Specs' and 'Brooslee' accentuate the absurdity and grotesqueness of their surroundings.
The brothers become close through a shared love of football, supporting the same team, Dinamo Bucuresti. Ultimately, The Baiut Alley Lads is a novel about miracles that take place within a nightmare, regardless of whether they occur in an obscure lane in an obscure district of a country kept in obscurity by communist dictatorship.
Greeted as the work of a distinctive and original new voice, his first novel was awarded the Romania literara (Literary Romania) magazine Prize for Debut, the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Best Prose Debut, and the National Union of Employers Prize for Excellence. Together with Matei Florian, his younger brother, Filip Florian recently published the unusual dialogic novel The Baiut Alley Lads which has now been translated and published in English for the first time. |
