Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, Georgina Harding's Painter of Silence is an intimate and devastating portrait of Romania during and after the Second World War. In the early 1950s, a nameless man is found on the steps of a hospital. Deaf and mute, he is unable to communicate until a young nurse called Safta brings him paper and pencils with which he can draw. These memories also belong to Safta, for the man is Augustin - the son of the cook at the manor house where Safta grew up. Born six months apart, they grew up with a connection that bypassed words. But while Augustin's world remained the same size Safta's expanded to embrace languages, society - and a fleeting love, one long, hot summer. But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and nothing would remain the same.