Eugen Chirovici: Forgotten Funerals & Misremembered Murders

Romanian thriller writer E.O. Chirovici’s first English language novel, The Book of Mirrors, created a publisher feeding frenzy, but the Transylvania native is no overnight success.

- Craig Sisterson

In a way, 52-year-old author Eugen Chirovici has his mother to thank for what could be his breakthrough international hit. The Romanian has three honorary doctorates (in economics, communications, and history), has been an advisor to the Romanian prime minister and the governor of the National Bank, a financial journalist, a manager at a television news station, and has published more than a dozen novels and nonfiction books since his debut thriller, Masacrul (The Massacre), sold 100,000 copies in his homeland back in the early 1990s.

But for all of Chirovici’s past successes, it was a conversation with his mother in 2013 that sowed the seeds for what would become The Book of Mirrors, a literary thriller that sparked bidding wars and a publisher feeding frenzy. The manuscript was presold into 38 territories and is now out in the US from Emily Bestler Books, an imprint of Atria. 

While living in Reading, a city in southern England known for its medieval ruins and outdoor rock music festival, Chirovici (pronounced Kirovitz), was chatting with his visiting mother and older brother about life growing up in Fagaras, a small town in Transylvania, central Romania.

“I told them I remembered the funeral for a local football player, who’d died very young in a car accident when I was a kid. They said I was a toddler at the time, so couldn’t have been there at the cemetery,” he says. But Chirovici was certain, going on to detail memories of the open coffin, and a football placed on the dead man’s chest. Our minds can play tricks. “They said those details were true, but I’d probably heard them from them or my dad, after they’d attended the funeral. ‘But you definitely weren’t there with us,’ my mum added.”