Set during a dictator’s last hundred days in power, Patrick McGuinness’ accomplished debut explores a world of danger, repression and corruption.
Patrick McGuinness
The Last Hundred Days is set in the last days of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, where Patrick McGuinness lived. It was not his first revolution: he was in Iran during the fall of the Shah.
McGuinness is nothing if not international: he was born in Tunisia to an Anglo-Irish father and a French-speaking Belgian mother and has lived in Belgium, Venezuela, Iran, Romania, Oxford and Wales. If he feels anything it is Welsh and stood as a Plaid Cymru candidate in the 2019 elections for the European Parliament. He is a poet and Oxford academic – specialising in modernist literature – as well as a novelist. He is aware of the dangers of mixing his métiers, not least ‘slabs of set-pieces; micro-interest in sensations and textures, and gratuitous phrase-making’.
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