Domnica Radulescu’s My Father’s Orchards is a moving, layered story about memory, loss, and survival, set against the shifting, often brutal realities of 20th-century Romania. It follows Corina, a woman who returns to her home country in 2015, determined to face the ghosts, both real and imagined, that have followed her family through war, communism, and exile.

The book alternates between Corina’s present-day journey and the memories that shaped her: childhood moments during the war, the hunger and fear of life under a dictatorship, and the strength it took for her family to endure. Radulescu’s writing is rich with sensory detail: the parched soil of a war-damaged orchard, the smell of fruit ripening under a hot sun, the quiet courage of a mother scraping together enough to keep her children alive. These images ground the novel in lived experience, making the reader feel every moment of both hardship and hope.

Corina’s mother is the heart of the story, a woman who refuses to be broken by circumstance. Through her, Radulescu captures the strength of women who carry whole families on their backs while history does its best to crush them.

Written through the realism is the presence of a strigoi girl from Romanian folklore, a haunting, otherworldly figure who blurs the line between the living and the dead. She’s more than a ghost; she’s a symbol of the pain that lingers long after events have passed, a reminder that history doesn’t let go just because time moves on. The orchard itself becomes more than a setting. It’s a place of loss, of memory, of beginnings and endings. It holds sweetness and decay at the same time, much like the family’s own history. By the end, it feels less like a location and more like a living witness to everything that’s happened.

This is a story about survival, yes, but also about identity, how it’s shaped by the land we come from, the language we speak, and the people who raise us. The relationships between mothers, daughters, and sisters are drawn with honesty and care, showing how love can persist even when the world turns unrecognizable.

Radulescu pulls from history, folklore, and poetry to create something that feels both deeply personal and universal. The fragmented structure mirrors how memory works, how it skips, repeats, and shifts, but it never leaves the reader behind. Instead, it builds a kind of intimacy, as if Corina is telling her story directly to the reader.

My Father’s Orchards is a novel that stays with you. It’s tender and brutal, beautiful and painful, rooted in a specific time and place but speaking to something timeless about the human spirit. It’s the kind of book you carry in your mind for days after, replaying moments and sentences. Highly recommended.