Soldiers: A Bucharest Story - Softcover

Schiop, Adrian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 630953775X ISBN 13: 9786309537751

Publisher: Type-M, 2026

Synopsis

A queer love story about class, race, money, and self-deception, from the poorest quarter of Bucharest.

Adi is forty, newly single, and four years into a doctorate on manele, the Roma pop music that respectable Romania despises, which is why he lives in Ferentari. He knows the rules: never give your real name, and never take a man home from a bar.

In March he takes home Alberto the Fist, who went inside at fifteen, came out at thirty, and now lives off a gangster cousin who feeds him, slaps him, and keeps an eye on him. He has a bad back, no ID, and a gift for making a man feel loved. By May he has moved in. The doctoral grant is going on beer and slot machines, and Adi insists on calling it fieldwork.

The money will not last the summer.

Soldiers caused a scandal in Romania, won two novel-of-the-year prizes, and was adapted into a film directed by Ivana Mladenović and starring the author. Schiop writes the way the neighbourhood talks-funny, obscene, sparing nobody, least of all himself.

Translated from the Romanian by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

About this title

About the Authors

Adrian Schiop was born in 1973 in Porumbacu de Jos, a village at the foot of the Făgăraș Mountains. A trailblazing voice in Romanian autofiction and queer literature, his eclectic career has included teaching high school, painting houses in New Zealand, and working as a journalist in Bucharest. Soldiers is his third novel.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is an Irish author and translator who has lived in Bucharest for over twenty years. He has published three acclaimed short story collections: Trouble, The Pleasant Light of Day, and Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse, the last of which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. As a translator, his work includes bringing Mihail Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years to a global readership with Penguin Classics.

Edition details

• Publisher: Type-M
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 630953775X
• ISBN 13: 9786309537751
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 258