Three suggestions:
-
Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel (2009). A novel by the Banat-Swabian Nobel laureate, born in a village outside Timisoara in 1953. The Hunger Angel describes a young man's deportation to a Soviet forced-labour camp at the end of World War II — a fictional account drawn closely from the testimony of the poet Oskar Pastior and from Müller's own mother. The novel is among the most exact accounts in fiction of life under late Stalinism, and a quietly devastating introduction to the experience of Romania's German-speaking minority in the 20th century.
-
Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums (1994). Müller's earlier novel set during the last years of the Ceaușescu regime, following four young Banat-Swabian friends from a Timisoara university through interrogation, surveillance, exile and suicide. The prose is dense and the story claustrophobic; together they capture the exact texture of life under the regime that fell in 1989.
-
Mike Ormsby, Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania (2008). A more accessible journalistic introduction by a BBC reporter who lived in Romania for over a decade. Short chapters cover the texture of post-Communist Romanian life — the squeezed gypsies, the wolf-shepherd standoffs in the Carpathians, the corruption — without descending into expat condescension. Half of the book is set in Bucharest but several chapters cover the Banat and Timisoara specifically.