‘I Must Betray You’: No Fruit, No Freedom

This coming-of-age tale is set in Romania when the Iron Curtain lay heavy on the countries of Eastern Europe.

"I Must Betray You" by Ruta Sepetys is set during the time that Romania was behind the Iron Curtain. Philomel Books

A girl in the classroom has a banana in her lunch. “How did she get it?” he asks himself. He can smell it all the way across the room. Ever since that moment, he dreams of having a banana. He’s never tasted a banana, and he certainly has never tasted freedom.

Cristian is a 17-year-old boy in Bucharest, Romania, and the year is 1989 in Ruta Sepetys’s novel “I Must Betray You.”