Doina Gecse-Borgovan: Haza: úton [Home: On the Road]. Translated by Júlia Vallasek Júlia. Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2025

Category: Fiction
Pages: 278
Cover: paperback
ISBN: 978-606-8957-51-7

Doina Gecse-Borgovan (Brăila, 1974) is a Romanian writer and radio journalist, who works for Radio Cluj. Her books include Rătăciri deliberate (Editura Litera, 2023) and Libelula (Editura Paralela 45, 2024). Her current work was awarded the debut prize by the Cluj branch of the Romanian Writers’ Association (2023).

Doina Gecse-Borgovan’s volume of autofiction reveals episodic glimpses of a diverse, multilingual, multicultural world that blends tradition and modernity, from her childhood in Dobrogea in the 1980s through her student life in Cluj-Napoca in the 1990s to the recent past. The Romanian author’s hometown, Brăila, is shrouded in mystery and exoticism in these stories, yet it feels strangely familiar to the reader—perhaps from our own childhoods. The texts have extraordinary descriptive power, whether they are about the silhouette of a character recalled from a long-ago event, the rules of the children’s world that formed around the apartment blocks, the atmosphere of a summer morning, the freezing Romanian apartments in the 1980s, or a magnolia tree leaning over a city street. The style of the volume is characterized primarily by the richness of subjective observations and the vividness of the descriptions: sounds, colors, smells, shapes, and textures contribute to the captivating reading experience. Last but not least, Home: On the Road often addresses the reader, initiating a dialogue with them and, what”s more, encouraging them to write about their own meandering journeys home. The volume, which contains numerous Hungarian references, is available to Hungarian readers in a translation by Júlia Vallasek.