A resounding success with public and critics alike, his latest novel, "Matei the Brown" ("Matei Brunul"), Iaşi: Polirom, 2011, was awarded numerous prizes and has been translated into French, at Gaïa Éditions, and it was very well received by the press. The novel has been translated also into Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, and is due to be translated into English and to be published by (Dalkey Archive Press). "Matei The Brown" is set in the period between 1945 and 1959. The novel's protagonist, Bruno Matei, a Romanian puppeteer of Italian ancestry, is presented from two different perspectives, on two narrative levels. In the first, which unfolds in Iași, over the course of the year 1959, he is suffering from partial amnesia following an accident, and is a free man, albeit constantly shadowed by Bojin, the secret policeman assigned to him. A relationship develops between him and the secret policeman, and a series of ‘mysteries’ regarding Bruno Matei's past life are placed in circulation. As a diversion, the Securitate invents dramatic events in the main character's past, events which obviously never took place, but whose sole purpose is to remould his present, to make him docile and obedient to the new totalitarian order. The second narrative, equal in length to the first, focuses on Bruno Matei's real past, spent in four communist prisons: the Uranus Penitentiary in Bucharest, the Valea Neagră Peninsula Penal Colony, Galaţi Penitentiary, and Iași Penitentiary. The two narratives unfold in parallel, so that the Securitate’s diversionary actions are one by one exploded by the often disarmingly innocent story of a man crushed beneath the juggernaut of the social and political changes that swept Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. "Matei the Brown" is the first purely fictional work to explore the communist prison system in Romanian literature. The blurb for the back cover of the English edition of the novel (in print) is written by the acclaimed writer and literary critic David Lodge. He wrote: "So many excellent novels have been written about life under communism in Soviet Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe that it difficult for any writer today to find an original way to depict the oppressiveness, inhumanity, and institutionalised injustice of those regimes before they began to collapse in 1989.