A woman reached for the ashtray on the table, lifted it up, and looked beneath it. when I was on tour for my first novel, Between Shades of Gray, I was in Bucharest, sitting outside with my publisher, my interpreter, and a few other people. Because of my family’s experience, I felt that I had a general understanding of postwar communist systems. My father was a victim of communism: He fled Lithuania and spent nine years in refugee camps before making it to the United States. How did you come to write about this point in Romanian history? Sepetys spoke with us over Zoom from her home in Nashville the conversation has been edited for length and clarity. This page-turning thriller is made all the more poignant and tragic through the knowledge that millions of ordinary Romanians lived through nightmarish situations like his. Threatened with charges of treason and promised medication to help his beloved, ailing grandfather, Cristian agrees to betray friends and family and become an informer for the Securitate, Romania’s secret police. 1), she focuses on Cristian Florescu, a teenage Romanian boy living during the final days of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s brutal communist dictatorship in the late 1980s. In her fifth novel, I Must Betray You (Philomel, Feb. It’s no surprise that international bestselling author Ruta Sepetys has won awards for riveting, emotionally arresting historical fiction that spotlights moments in history that most young readers know little about.

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys