"The Hunger Angel" by Herta Muller *****

• Romanian author
• Nobel Prize winner
• Originally published in 2009
• Review:  Profoundly disturbing, exquisitely evocative, heartrending.  I do not know how else to characterize this magnificent piece of writing. Muller uses language (and I read this in an English translation) as few writers I have ever read have been able to.  I felt as if I was inside the soul of Leo, a young man sent to a Russian work camp at the end of WWII.  I am anything but a squeamish reader, yet I repeatedly had to set this book down because of the pain evoked by the author's prose.  Just as Leo is haunted for the rest of his life by the hunger angel, I will be haunted by this powerful novel!