Mission London by Alek Popov

Alek Popov is a leading figure on Bulgaria's contemporary literature scene. Having written numerous award-winning short stories and scripts, which have been translated into over a dozen languages, Mission London is his first novel. In a style "something like Pulp Fiction," it tackles the behaviour of Bulgaria's new elite on the eve of accession.

The action is set in an Eastern European embassy in London. Alek himself worked in the Bulgarian embassy in London in 1997-98. "The background of the book is very real for this reason. I wasn't intending to write this book actually, but over time the material started accumulating and I felt I must write something about it. There was too much precious material to be lost. It's the small details that I like, they are completely real."

As for the characters, "Some of the main characters have something to do with real people, but in the end it turned out that they evolved into archetypes of characters from the Transition." The "Transition", the time after the fall of Communism, was a period of change from the old Socialist ways to democracy. This brought with it struggles for a new identity.

"The main strands of the plot chart the struggle for representation and for a new image of both the elite and the ordinary citizen. It looks at how ordinary people from Eastern Europe are trying to adapt to the West and be part of a greater Europe, a process which involves the disruption of many illusions."

"On the other side, it is about perceptions the West has about itself and about Eastern Europe." Alek wants to invert the balance in which it was traditionally the West that "imagined" or "colonised" other cultures by writing about them from a Western standpoint. "This book is also an attempt to colonise the West through the view of the Eastern European order."

Translated by Charles de M Gill.