Synopses & Reviews
When Kitty Crozier awakens in a hospital one morning, she looks into the face of a stranger with "a glint of something like silver in his smile." Months later, she encounters him again in a London park. This time Virgil Florescu, a dissident poet who fled Romania by swimming across the Danube, doesn't disappear. Virgil's delicate courtship of the shy Kitty blossoms into a captivating romance that shines through even the darkest Eastern European past.
Moving fluidly between contemporary times, 1930s Romania, and England during the 1950s, Kitty & Virgil tells an epic and bittersweet story of two unlikely lovers and their extraordinary families. Paul Bailey writes a humorous and heartbreaking tale that expertly combines a classic English comedy of manners with a haunting meditation on the burdens of the past.
Review
Superb...Paul Bailey is too little known here, as the arrival of this luminous book reminds us. (Publishers Weekly)
Review
Crackles with repartee and literary allusion...Compelling. (The Washington Post Book World)
Synopsis
Kitty Crozier wakes up in the hospital and sees the fleeting image of Virgil Florescu, a dissident poet who swam across the Danube to escape Ceausescu's Romania. A subsequent vision of Virgil signals the beginning of the most important relationship of Kitty's life---one in which previous lives will be oddly connected.