Red Hands

With elegance and journalistic precision, this novel speaks to the timeless struggle of individuals up against powerful collectives.

- Midwest Book Review

Sargent’s work reads like memoir, written in Iordana’s voice. But Sargent’s skilled writing provides vivid images, lively character studies, a portrait of a brutal, controlling regime, insights into the nature of love, friendship and courage, and tension maintained at such a pitch, that it was almost a relief when the blood eventually began to spill. In an era of books geared to gendered markets, there’s more than enough of both romance and political intrigue to satisfy both groups.

- Helen Johnson - Historical Novel Society

Haz de necaz. The term – Romanian for rueful laughter – fittingly appears a number of times in this novel. It pretty much describes Red Hands’ tone – tragedy hardened further by comedy.
After his extraordinary second novel, The Boston Castrato, Colin Sargent shifts his intelligent and sharp focus from 1920s USA to the Romania of the 1960s onwards.
Employing a part autobiographical, part fictionalised first person account, he empathetically describes the troubled life of Iordana Ceauscescu, wife of Valentin, the eldest child of Nicolae and Elena.
Although increasingly critical of Romania under the wonderfully self-described Danube of Thought and the Mother of the Nation, this is less a comprehensive critique of the Romanian socialist regime than a very personal story of love and loss amidst senior political families.
Herself the daughter of senior communist party members, ‘Dana’ has the temerity to exercise self-agency by marrying Valentin, the most self-contained and least ideological of the Ceaucescus.
Having done so in the face of opposition from both families, but especially against the express instructions of the ironclad Elena, the young couple are pretty much cast out of the Ceauscescu orbit, although not entirely free of the ministrations of the Securitate.
Sargent is at his most skilful and immersive in describing the interior life of Dana as she both seeks to accommodate Elena’s wishes whilst trying to retain the affections of Valentin. The latter, as with all the Ceauscescu children, slowly succumb to the immense gravitational pull of their parents, causing Dana further humiliation and heartbreak…
Sargent’s description of the street battles and looting in Bucharest are palpitatingly told, fully engaging the reader in the narrowness of their survival.
This is a fine book and an excellent read.

- Paul Simon - Morning Star