Bored by religious instruction and painting lessons, a group of friends at a convent school spend their days dreaming of romance, fashion and the latest gramophone records. One by one, they give up their visions of adventure and submit to provincial life, marrying for money and status, like their mothers before them. Plain, jaundiced Lucretia, becomes the envy of her friends when Paul, a glamorous dandy proposes, but she hides a shocking secret that will destroy their marriage and expose them to scandal. Only Adriana Dunea, the most beautiful and talented girl in the school seems destined for happiness with her childhood sweetheart, Gelu. But everything changes when, on a trip to Bucharest, she meets Cello Viorin, a famous composer...

Prizes

Winner of Blue Star - Kirkus Reviews 2019,Winner of PEN TRANSLATES 2019

"Sebastian gives a remarkably sensitive, candid portrayal of the coming of age of a girl seen through the eyes of a suitor. The author's sensitivity to the emotions of his heroine Adriana is captured vividly in this translation in such passages as "every kiss was a wound, in which their lips, their breath, their teeth, the tips of their tongues drowned, warm and wet, and parted slowly, with a final hesitation, leaving on each mouth a blurred, faded smile." - Dennis Deletant, Ion Ratiu Visiting Professor of Romanian Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC "Reigh handily preserves Sebastian's supple, languid syntax, shaping each sentence to accentuate his exquisite lyricism, as when the couple remains unable to yield entirely to their desire "to be held in such a way that it obliterated everything apart from the ecstasy of the flesh. An endearingly wistful story of young love." - Kirkus Reviews Blue Starred review "In The Town with Acacia Trees, Mihail Sebastian writes with the sensibility of a master jeweller. He crafts with precision and delicacy his characters' intricate souls. Sebastian's profound humanism, his utopian universalism, is as refreshing and urgent in today's climate of rising nationalisms as it was in the interwar period. Gabi Reigh's riveting translation matches Sebastian's writing like a glove." -Alex Boican, PhD in Romanian Literature

Mihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Braila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays. His novel For Two Thousand Years is a Penguin Modern Classic. Gabi Reigh's translations and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today and The Fortnightly Review. She has won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was shortlisted for the Tom-Gallon Society of Authors short story award. She is currently engaged in a translation project called Interbellum Series focusing on works from the Romanian interwar period, including the poetry of Lucian Blaga.